While most 13-year-olds out there are either busy studying, gaming or watching television, here’s one who is different. She not only cooks up a storm but is also set to inspire people across the world with her culinary prowess.
Esha Karthiraj, from Bengaluru, loves cooking. And she has been rewarded for this passion by being chosen to speak at the inaugural TED-Ed Weekend event at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) headquarters in New York. In total, 20 children from across the globe have been selected. TED is a non profit organisation, devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. TED-ED, the youth and education initiative was started in order to celebrate and encourage ideas of children and teachers around the world.
Esha joined the club started by TED-Ed about three years ago with the help of an institute named Sparkling Mindz in Bengaluru.
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Sreeja Iyer, who runs Sparkling Mindz said, “Esha has been a part of our after school programme for four years now.”
In their first class, Sreeja asked 15 children who had joined the club to list three things that they were passionate about. For Esha, one option was cooking. Those selected prepared their talks and recorded them. A few months after they were submitted, Sreeja got to know that three of them had been selected and their recording was uploaded on the TED-Ed blog. In August this year, Esha was selected to speak live at their first event.
Her talk, How I chased my dream and learned , is about her plans of becoming a master chef and her philosophy in life. She talks about her first attempt at cooking where she made a dessert with cocoa powder, baking powder and sugar but did not bake it. It didn’t taste right, she says. However, it was a valuable learning experience, and she learned not to quit.
“I feel that people look at cooking simply as an act of survival – you cook, you eat the food, and that’s pretty much about it. I look at it from a different perspective. From a young age, I saw my mother and grandmother cooking, and also found myself surrounded by cooking shows on TV and YouTube and so on. It really fascinated me because cooking is so much more than an act of survival — it is creative and innovative. People would say that you can’t mix things like chilli and chocolate because apparently, it just doesn’t work. I wanted to break the so-called rules so I just tried it and found it to be good,” she said, in an interview.
