It started in my mother's kitchen.
Growing up in Calcutta, my mother recreated dishes from places we had never visited, using whatever ingredients she could find. Her kitchen became my first passport, and it sparked a lifelong curiosity about other cultures and the stories food can tell.
Five cities, four countries, one lesson learned over and over: languages and customs differ, but people everywhere gather around a table.
I moved to the United States as a teenager and began eating my way through Atlanta, then New York. An engineering degree led to strategy consulting, and an MBA in Barcelona followed, which, if I am honest, was partly an excuse to immerse myself in Spanish and Catalan cuisine.
For more than twelve years at IBM and Deloitte, I helped C-suites navigate disruption, build growth strategies and design new business models across industries and geographies. The work taught me clarity: how to distil complexity into structures that enable reinvention and long-term value.
Then I made the decision to leave corporate life and dedicate myself fully to food, travel and storytelling. Not a small leap. The best ones rarely are.
Today I am the founder of Crispy Compass, where I explore regional food cultures through immersive writing, and the host of The Elsewhere Club, a London supper club that brings those stories to life around a shared table. I am also beginning to curate small-group culinary journeys, taking travellers into the markets, kitchens and everyday rituals behind the dishes I write about. I was honoured to receive the Guild of Food Writers Newcomer of the Year Award 2026, to serve on the board of Off Assignment, an award-winning literary travel magazine championing place-based narratives, and to teach food writing through organisations like the International Association of Culinary Professionals.
"In a world that feels increasingly divided, travel, and especially food, has the power to build curiosity, empathy and genuine human connection."
Strategy and story were never really separate.
What unites both halves of my career is a fascination with growth, storytelling and transformation. Whether I am designing business models for enterprises navigating disruption, helping a literary nonprofit expand its footprint and revenue streams, or writing essays on how food connects us to place and to each other, the job is the same: find the story that makes sense of the complexity, then tell it well.
Food, I have come to believe, is one of the most powerful ways to understand a place. Every dish carries geography, migration, history, resilience and identity within it. When we learn why people eat what they eat, we begin to understand the lives, traditions and values that shaped it.
The best journeys change how we see the world.
Curious where yours might start? Have a look at my writing, or come eat with me.
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