In the Hindustan Times magazine supplement, Brunch, the food writer Vir Sanghvi writes about Asma Khan, the former Sunday magazine journalist whose hashtag could well be #SubKaChaatSubKaVikas.
(Sunday, launched by the Ananda Bazaar Patrika group, is now defunct. M.J. Akbar was its first editor.)
Writes Sanghvi:
“It is a funny feeling when a colleague from decades ago becomes a success in a totally different field. And it feels even stranger when you find yourself writing a profile of somebody you once knew as a sub-editor.
“In 1990, when I edited Sunday magazine, a young girl came to see me to ask if she could try her hand at journalism. She worked at Lintas, the ad agency, she said, and wanted to do something different but not entirely unrelated.
“I hired her on the spot and all of us in the office thought she was very bright and articulate. Then, a few months later, she announced that she was getting married, resigned from her position and went off to live in Cambridge with her new husband.
“And that, I thought, was the last I would hear of Asma Khan.
“Wrong, very wrong.”
Twenty-five years on, Asma, who organised private dinners unbeknownst to her husband, and ran a pop-up restaurant in a London pub, was apparently “discovered” in 2015 by “London’s most influential critic”, Fay Maschler.
And one dish led to another, she became the first British chef to be featured on Chef’s Table, and will soon open all-women kitchens in Syria.
“She is not short on confidence and ambition, our Asma. And I have a feeling that she will end up being the most successful person to ever emerge from the offices of Sunday magazine!” writes Sanghvi.
Read the full story: The rise of Miss Khan
IJR 