A life lived along the Tropic of Cancer

I grew up in Korba, Chhattisgarh — a small city in the coal belt where the market smelled of raw turmeric and mahua flowers, and food was never written down because everyone already knew. Then came Surat, Gujarat, where I was raised on undhiyu and the particular sweetness Gujaratis fold into everything. My roots, though, are in Bhopal — my parents' city, the one I return to, the one that made me.

I studied and worked in Maharashtra before the road brought me to California. Trained as a software engineer, I spent years building systems — but the thing I kept returning to was the food nobody here had tasted. Central India's flavors are among the most layered in the subcontinent, and almost entirely unknown to the world. That felt like something worth fixing.

23rd Parallel is my answer. A Californian table set with forgotten recipes of the heartland — reinterpreted with local produce and the eye of someone who has lived at both ends of the world. Not fusion. Not nostalgia. Something new, grown from something very old.