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I
was born in Mumbai, when it was still called Bombay, in a family
of high achievers. My dad is a civil engineer, my mother is one
of India's best known journalists and my brother is a surgeon.
My childhood was spent with my grandmother (who was a great and
passionate cook), with many aunts (who spent each afternoon cooking
up goodies for when we came home from school) and of course with
my mother (who introduced us to world cuisines at an early age and
whose high profile career meant that we often took tea with people
such as musician Pandit Ravi Shankar or the President of India).
It was a charmed life!
I grew up learning Indian classical dance, traditional Indian beauty
secrets and good traditional cooking and developed a great passion
for the vibrancy and diversity of my country.
I completed a 3 year professional diploma in Hotel Management,
Catering Technology and Applied Nutrition from the Hotel Management
Institute in Bombay, considered the finest of its kind in India.
Here
I qualified as a chef and my love for cooking was polished to a
fine art! Later I did a BA in Ancient Indian History, Politics and
Economics. A diploma in natural beauty therapy followed.
I then moved to London where I also got a diploma in Journalism.
Meanwhile my training in Indian dance continued and along with everything
else, I also became a professional performer. If you will like to
read more about my dance career click
here.
I set up my first home in England when I was 22. I tried out countless
recipes in order to replicate what had come out of my mother's kitchen
in Bombay. I tried new methods, ingredients and combinations until
I taught myself a style that I was comfortable with. Although I
was a qualified chef, I needed to find a way to pare down the fuss
and bother of traditional Indian cooking.
Today, what I cook is quite straightforward and I use the time saved
to pursue some of my hobbies such as reading, travelling and restoring
Indian antiques.
I started writing professionally at the age of fifteen when I wrote
a weekly column on teenage issues such as relationships, education
and style for a leading newspaper called 'The Evening Standard'.
Early on in my cooking career, I worked as a food consultant to
the Times of India group of newspapers where I was responsible for
the catering of the executive dining suite where national and international
celebrities were entertained.
Later I worked for a couple of years at the Bombay Brasserie in
London where I was involved with party bookings and customer relations.
Needless to say, in my dance career, I have performed Indian dance
shows as a soloist and as a part of a company (Shobana Jeyasingh
and my own Monisha Bharadwaj Danceworks) in many international festivals
including Dance Umbrella (UK) Festival de Lille (France) and Du
Maurier World Stage Festival (Toronto).
I have won dance awards too, a prominent one being the 'Time Out
London Dance and Performance Award' for my choreography of a Bollywood
type musical.
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