Kitchen king’s starry dreams

[1]

More than two decades ago, he made his way to Indian kitchens via the television. Sanjeev Kapoor’s cookery show, Khana Khazana was something that people looked forward to in those days. Two decades down the line, the man who made cooking popular, is going to don another hat.

Sanjeev would be seen acting in two films — The Lunch Box and Super Nani. The first one is an Anurag Kashyap production to be directed by Ritesh Batra and the second one, which is based on women empowerment and stars Rekha and Sharman Joshi, will be directed by Indra Kumar.
He says it’s something that he would not really like to talk about much. “Yes, I would be doing these two films but I don’t think it’s something really big,” he humbly remarks, and wonders that for some reason a Bollywood break seems to be a very big thing for us.
“While for me it’s just one of things that I do,” he adds.
So, after a little probing he tells us that he will be doing strong cameos in these films and would like to keep the details under wraps until the right time. But he doesn’t hesitate talking about his take on acting and how exciting he finds it to be.
“I don’t know if I am good at it but I find it interesting,” he quips. In fact, it’s something that he loved doing during his school and college days. When he was 10, he did a stage play on the Mughals where he played the part of a Mughal emperor. “Since that day onwards, one of my uncles called me Badshaah Salamat till the time he was alive,” he recalls.
Since then he has made appearances on stage, sometimes as an actor and as an orator. During his college days at the Institute of Hotel Management, Pusa Road, he was a regular at theatre fests and debate competitions. “Facing the camera or being on the stage comes naturally to me,” he says and adds that even when he faced the camera for Khana Khazana for the first time, he wasn’t camera conscious.
The chef is not content doing just one thing. He wants to break the boundaries. He says he has always been like that. At a time when the world was running in a race to crack engineering and medical exams, he took up something as conventional as becoming a chef. He says he feels happy to be the first chef in the world to own a food channel.
Besides taking up acting and becoming a judge for the latest season of Masterchef India, he is also gearing up to empower women through Wonderchef that would help housewives to become businesswomen with the best kitchen equipment.