#587 Tarla

 Tarla

The image has been downloaded by the Author from Google Images

Recently, on my way home, in flight, I watched Tarla. It was a long international flight, and movies, as entertainment, came to my rescue.The movie is a biopic, acted by Huma Quereshi, made on Indian Chef and Author of several cookbooks and cast of various cooking shows, Tarla Dalaal.

Hailing from Pune, Tarla, after completing her studies, was in the process of getting married through an arranged marriage setup when her parents started searching for a suitable partner for her.

Inspired by a female Professor at her university, she wanted to achieve something in her life and was not so keen on marriage. When she told her mother her desire to do something big in her life, like all other Indian mothers, she was permitted to pursue her ambitions after marriage.

When her marriage proposal progressed with Nalin Dalaal, who as a Chemical Engineer, working as a Quality Engineer, in a reputed firm of India, she shared her desire with him who said that he would support her.

Being a vegetarian, she didn’t like her husband eating non-veg cuisines and started experimenting with making vegetarian dishes as tasty as non-vegetarian ones.

It all began when her neighbour sent her daughter to her to train her to cook, to get married. She would often advise her neighbour’s daughter to use her cooking skills to impress her in-laws to get the permission to do what she likes.

Photo by Nadine Primeau on Unsplash

At the marriage reception of her neighbour’s daughter, Tarla got requests from many mothers of daughters who wanted their daughters to get trained by her to fix their marriages.

Then came the idea of starting a cooking class at her home. She faced the backlash of other men of her society who felt she shouldn’t continue her classes in her home, as it was causing trouble to them.

With the shutdown of her cooking class, her husband suggested that she write a cookbook that would reach millions of women interested in cooking. On being rejected by the editor she approached to publish her book, her husband became the editor and publisher of her cookbook.

On seeing the failure of her book, she decided to sell off all the books to the raddiwaala. On finding her recipe being recreated in one of the restaurants she visited for dinner with her family, she decided to market her book through the raddiwaala, whose work was to collect rags from the houses of people.

Her book became best bestseller and she was invited to join the success party of her book launch, where a producer of a TV show met her and invited her to her office. She discussed how she wanted to cast Tarla in a TV show that would be aired on National Television.

In her journey, Tarla faced a lot of challenges. She juggled between taking care of her family and a demanding career. Her husband faced the loss of his job and insecurities due to the growing popularity of his wife, eventually securing one because of how supportive he was to his wife’s career.

The image has been downloaded by the Author from Google Images

Tarla decided to give up on the TV show as her family life suffered because of her absence. As a gesture of love and appreciation, she received a lot of letters from her readers and viewers.

The last scene shows how her husband comes forward to resolve the insecurities and indifference between them, and the movie ends on a happy note.

I wish every woman to pursue what they want to do in their lives, even after marriage, because ambition has no gender. Unlike the movie, neither every partner nor the household of in-laws is supportive of the ambition of a woman after marriage. Her desires or ambitions get choked in the chains of daily household responsibilities as if her ambitions are secondary with respect to her husband’s or children’s.

This movie is inspirational, not just for women but for men. If men, just like Nalin Dalaal, willingly share the household responsibilities by making women less burdened, and more enthusiastic about pursuing their ambitions, every household will bring the hidden Tarla to the limelight.

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Swati Sarangi,

17.06.2025

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P.s: This post is a part of #BlogchatterFoodFest hosted by blogchatter.