Heart and Hearth: A culinary school serves rigour with tenderness
I was a guest at the International Institute of Culinary Arts’ (IICA) dining room in Gurugram, where Chef Virender Datta and his son Arjun host small groups. The menu, crafted for me, moved from broccoli and roasted almond soup to ballotine de volaille à la princesse, pommes marquise and café noisette étoilé. I left thinking about Aamina Asad, who showed me the future of culinary education through a plate, a searching smile and a poem.
Aamina brought the course she had cooked to our table and introduced it with such confidence that appetite arrived before the first bite. I had told the Dattas I rarely take sauces. The ballotine’s cranberry glaze was just right: a sauce at summer’s end, already turning towards cooler days. She set the plate down with a proud smile. Her eyes searched my face for an answer she was too gracious to demand. In that glance was a kind of intelligence: attention to another person, the quiet reading of what has been received.
What stayed with me was how fully she inhabited the work. She knew what she had made, told its story, and wanted to know if it had reached us. Hospitality begins in this alertness: making something with care, offering it without vanity, waiting with hope for another human being to meet it.
When Aamina came by to check on us, I asked about her poem, written for August 15. She read it to us. Urdu and Hindi are her first languages; English, she said, gives her a wider vocabulary for expressing herself. We spoke about the freedom of finding a language that lets thought travel, even if it is not your first language.
Her poem begins with a question: “What does a generation do with a freedom it never had to earn?” It is sharply simple, beautifully inclusive. She writes of a girl measuring how late she can stay on a road that belongs to her, a boy taught to hide his hurt, a child invited to dream, then asked if it is practical. Fear, expectations and other people’s opinions build invisible borders inside us. Then she offers her answer: “The pen is ours.”
That line holds daring and empathy. She asks what inherited freedom must mean today: safety for a girl, room for a child’s ambition, permission for a man to cry. We are part of a larger human story, sharing the need for dignity, belonging and room to become ourselves.
Aamina comes from Muradabad, known for brass manufacturing and exports. From a comfortable, settled family, she has chosen the physical discipline of a professional kitchen and dreams of opening a mindful, wellbeing cafe. Her ambition and her poem belong together: both imagine people nourished and welcomed whole.
This is where the Dattas’ vision meets Aamina’s own. Chef Virender brings more than five decades in hospitality; Arjun carries the IICA forward. They have made a school where young people learn technique, discipline and the demands of the industry, with room for a student’s voice. Aamina cooked, spoke, and trusted us with words reaching beyond the classroom. The meeting of students, educators and institution felt like music, each bringing a note to make something larger. In school, discipline and tenderness share a table, preparing students to serve the world without losing sight of one another.
In a world turning inward, we need education that teaches skill without narrowing the spirit, and hospitality that lets us recognise ourselves in the person across the table. A plate nourishes for an evening; a poem reminds us what we owe one another. When a young woman offers both with confidence and courage, the future is already being served. The world should hear—and learn to play—this melody in its own key.