Yash Saxena in Kargil
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
On the way from Srinagar to Kargil, author and mountaineer Yash Saxena struck up a conversation with a group of youngsters from Kargil. Kargil, would soon become Yash’s base as they researched their book, Stories from a Kargili Kitchen, which then went on to be published by Penguin Books in January earlier this year.They asked the youngsters what their favourite dishes from their home cuisine were. “I assumed they would name some dishes from Kargil, but they kept saying names of dishes from Kashmir. I asked them if they didn’t eat Kargil food that often, and they said they never eat Kargil food. ‘It’s only for old people, and we’re not able to digest it’, they said,” says Yash.It was one of the first things that struck Yash: how much had changed within Kargil itself, and how a younger generation was growing increasingly distant from its own food.That question of what happens when a community begins to lose touch with its own food lies at the heart of Stories from a Kargili Kitchen, which grew out of Yash’s time in Kargil, where they lived, cooked and listened to local communities for over three years. At an evening for The Hindu Lit for Life Unplugged, Yash will bring some of those stories to Chennai in a conversation with restaurateur and entrepreneur Sandesh Reddy, looking at food not just as sustenance, but as a way of understanding place, memory and identity.
