One of my key takeaways from my peregrinations was how misrepresented Indian food still is. Chef Manish Mehrotra, formerly with the iconic Indian Accent restaurant, had vented at length about this during one of our meetings. ‘Indian food is not things just randomly mixed up in a bowl. We have a well-researched cuisine. Everything we do has a reason. The world needs to understand this,’ he fumed.

The import of his words was apparent everywhere I went. For instance, the idea of pairing teflam with mackerel in a vivacious Hindu Goan fish curry has an underlying logic. The native Goan pepper is a digestive and helps make the oily, heavy fish more palatable.

Indians have perfected the art of complexity and balance, of flavour combinations and interactions. The meticulousness of our cuisine is reflected most beautifully in our spice blends. Be it the Parsi dhansak masala, the vatap (a wet paste that forms the base of Goan curries) or the eight-spice Mappila garam masala used to season a Thalassery biryani, each mix is a masterpiece of measured precision. And it’s not always about spice mixes. Herbs take over plates in the northeast, where simplicity shines and every ingredient tastes luminously of itself.

I’ve often wondered why we don’t radiate a greater sense of joy and pride in our cuisine. We have more culinary diversity and traditions than anywhere else in the world. We have thousands of interpretations of the same dish. Yet we underplay our staggering wealth of culinary heritage.

Masters of alchemy, we can turn curdled milk into an ambrosial sweet (rasgulla) and ferment batter naturally to make our own version of crepes (dosai). We know a thing or two about olfactory stimulation (biryanis and pulaos) and layering fat with savouriness (butter chicken) to deliver knock-your-socks-off deliciousness. Why, then, are we not smitten with our food like we are with our cinema, our cricket, and our monuments?

France woke up early in the game to the potency (and marketability) of its cuisine by projecting gastronomy as being at the very heart of its national identity. In more recent times, Italy, Spain, Japan, and others have topped global culinary rankings. While the food of these nations is undoubtedly great, they have also taken it to that level by portraying it as a vital element of their soft power. Indians haven’t fully harnessed this potential yet.

There are reasons for this. The enormity of India’s size poses a challenge. As every Indian state has its own cuisine and sub-cuisines, gastronomic pride in India has existed more in a regional rather than national sense. Add to that the colonial hangover induced by nearly 200 years of British rule, which significantly impacted the way we think and talk about our food.

Also, our culinary culture has been historically based upon the oral transfer of recipes. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai points out, ‘Recipes, the elementary forms of culinary life, are missing in the great tradition of Hinduism…. Food is principally either a moral or medical matter in traditional Hindu thought.’

To fully honour and successfully leverage our exceptional legacy, we need to elevate our culinary discourse. Finding new relevance in the midst of our growing global stature, we ought to become a lot more nuanced in the depiction of our foodscape. The brilliance of our classics hides in plain sight. To uncover this magic, we need to tell the unique stories of the fantastic dishes we have and verbalise their appeal.