How India helped me defeat COVID the second time around | Eye News,The Indian Express

The fluidity with which India breathes, moves forward, connects with the past, and looks ahead to tomorrow kept me from breaking, made me see hope where a year ago I found none.

My life as a chef and consultant takes me to places that I could never have imagined when I first began cheffing in my early 20s. I’ve cooked for royalty, heads of state, business tycoons, popular celebrities, fashion icons, revered artists, and everyday people. Each has left an indelible imprint on my psyche. Many a time I have felt that I am the one educated in the exchange, with tutelage schools can’t impart and money can’t buy. It is human interaction, its myriad emotional connections or the lack thereof, that I find to be the most valuable pieces of the puzzle that is my professional life. To communicate and be able to affect change, to help plant seeds of movements that make life richer and more sustainable, to mentor a life and help it come of age, one must speak, act, teach and share with authenticity, touching minds and hearts, and leaving the other person questioning, reflecting, thinking, debating, getting riled up or finding affirmation.

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Recently, a second bout of COVID left me in quarantine, only this time it was in Mumbai, in the residence of two luxury hotels. During my enforced stay, I found myself understanding afresh the many gifts that life has bestowed upon me and the lucky perch from which I live.

Miles away from the comforts of my own bed and missing my bloodhound, Clouseau, I wasn’t concerned about the 104 degrees Fahrenheit fever and painful chills, incessant sweating and debilitating cough racking my body. COVID had taken from me the joys of touching lives at the pop-up planned by luxury-brand consultant Anandita De and superstar restauranteur Suren Joshi. Instead of worrying about the headache, which was worse than any migraine, and body aches that felt like I’d been hit by a truck and left to die on the road, I was sad that the chefs in the kitchen of Joshi House in Bandra, Mumbai, weren’t giving me lessons or getting hands-on cookery lessons from me. I was lamenting not being able to sit in a pre-service meeting and observe how the manager of the restaurant inspired his team or hear how they questioned the format with which my mentee Vardaan Marwah and I were presenting our progressive Indian cuisine. I mourned my inability to interact with the team members, as I’d wished to enrich my mind with their voices, questions, reactions, unique perceptions. Of course, I’d also wished to leave them with a little bit of my own quirk and self.

When I first got COVID in the US last year, days before my left-shoulder surgery, I found myself in a deep, dark abyss. A glum, gloomy, sepulchral space of tenebrously lugubrious thinking and dire hopelessness. A disconsolate, wretched malaise had overtaken my usual sunny disposition. My chipper mind had been chipped away by the virus and the fraying social fabric that is 21st century America. My hotel stay in Westchester, New York, seemed like an incarceration worse than life imprisonment. Even with family visiting me at a safe distance, I couldn’t shake away my angst. NYC, my soul city and home for 30 years, felt cold, incapable of healing me. Even before my body felt pain, my mind and heart were being shattered beyond repair. I saw death at close quarters, and it took everything I had to fight the terror my mind was wreaking on my psyche. That I came out alive, had surgery, and lived to tell the tale is a miracle I couldn’t foresee in that hotel.

https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/suvir-saran-covid-pandemic-india-8003871/

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