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I like cooking. I’m not saying I’m great at cooking or whatever, but I like cooking. They say, in life, you should do what you like doing. I heard them and joined a 4 year professional cooking course at a reputed institution. As my course is coming to a conclusion, I wanna say, liking something is one thing and obtaining a degree in what you like is a completely different thing. I also want to elaborate on my journey in the cooking institute.

I expected to cook many delicious dishes in the process. But they hardly ever tested my cooking skills. All they kept asking were the recipes of famous dishes, that too more than a decade older. Now, you could not make up fancy versions of these recipes. You have to write the version which your instructor cares about!

Sometimes, we had the task of making some of these delicacies ourselves. We made them with great effort in the beginning. But our instructors never really tasted the food we prepared. They just saw the outer decoration of the dishes and the aroma and judged us on that. Smart people that we are, we did things differently the next time. No one cared about the contents of the dishes, but we always, always decorated with the best of the toppings from then on! Another rule, all the preparations taste the same as all of them are prepared with the same gravy.

If you like the food in a restaurant, you complement the restaurant manager for that. Something similar happens with us. If our dishes are exceptional, the credit is taken away by our instructors who portray it as their own work. It’s cheating, but as a trainee, you have little to complain.

Now when external examiners from other institutes came to test us, they mostly asked us about the dishes we didn’t make or study. Being a chef in a restaurant, they expect us to know the current wholesale and retail price of soyabean. Despite this system, some of my colleagues do manage to get all answers right.

A good cook has to cook whatever that comes his way in the syllabus, even if he is nauseated about some of the things in it. It’s about completing the task, whether it suits you or whether you like it is a different story. You are not the one who decides the menu.

Every semester the menu changes, the specials change, but the approach remains the same. We have adapted to the system really well. Make everything and try to add the spices. Don’t forget to add the pinch of salt otherwise the food will lose its taste.

It will be a different story henceforth when we join a restaurant as a chef. Practical life teaches you a lot doesn’t it. Degrees do not actually imply what we have accomplished. It just tells that we are familiar with the field.

Replace cooking by any other profession in the post and it’ll work fine.