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What’s cooking at Cannes!
Celebrity chef Sanjyot Keer’s debut on the Cannes red carpet sprouts sentiments about family trees, riding the adage, “What’s in a (sur)name!” Genealogies, lie dormant for decades, sometimes a lifetime, then suddenly spring to life
It’s that time of the year that you Cannes never have enough of.
But in all the bombardment by the media, what recently arrested one’s attention was a wee bit of news item.
Among the movers and shakers is an Indian with a propensity less for the dishy, more for the dish.
The second Indian chef, after Vikas Khanna, to grace the Cannes red carpet is again a Punjabi chef, Sanjyot Keer.
On spotting tidings that one shares this unusual surname with a celebrity legging it upon the Cannes red carpet, what’s the first instinct? Relatively speaking.
“Kudos, Keers are going places!”
The second instinctive line of thought.
‘Heck, we may jolly well be relatives. Distant cousins, perhaps!”
Voila, thoughts of family trees started to sprout in the mind.
Now, family trees are a strange thing. They lie dormant for decades, sometimes a lifetime, then suddenly they spring to life.
A name pops up out of the blue, celebrity or otherwise, and bestirs in the bosom thoughts about roots and branches.
A family tree is like a forgotten song that one suddenly stumbles upon, on an erstwhile casette tape. It rekindles sentiments that send one scurrying to detangle and decode those dangling, long lost casette tapes. In the fervent hope of unraveling some lines, some lyrics of a buried song.
Ah, but this case of a Cannes connection, one humbly suspects it to bear close resemblance, nah not to the probable distant relative, but to a propensity of human behaviour called basking in reflected glory.
Reflected glory has its own litany of curious tales.
Like when Kamala Harris made it to the US vice-presidential berth. It did to a million tales of a Kamala connect give birth.
Poor little Besant Nagar was jerked out of its obscurity overnight. Every tom dick and harry (read “Tomar, Avik and Hari”) presiding over any bit of brick and mortar or back-of-beyond bylane in Besant Nagar was suddenly spawning tales of being related to Kamala kith and kin back home in Chennai.
Yours truly, too, swam tad with the tide then, by penning a piece with a curious Kamala connect.
My Kamala connect had had to do less with emotional chords, more to do with umbilical cords. For, by a quaint quirk of fate my bonny progeny had eons ago been brought into the world by Kamala’s chithi (masi) Sarala Gopalan.
Basking in reflected glory can sometimes have to do not with cords but crowns.
Some decades ago when saddi Punjabi kudi Nikita Anand had been crowned miss India, the family tree had blithely asserted itself.
She had bestowed us with our own chithi (masi) moment of basking in reflected glory. It’s another matter that our acquaintance to the family’s beauty queen had been confined to cooing to her in the cradle.
Coming to the Cannes connect, one is tempted to turn to the family tree to find if, like a Manmohan Desai masala script, the Cannes chef is a remote cousin long lost in a Kumbh Ka Mela (or closer home at a Baisakhi mela).
The curious case of “when family tree met Sunny.”
