Degrees of Success

As a young assistant manager in in the early 1980s in Chopsticks, a midsize Chinese restaurant in Mumbai, Shatbhi Basu didn't have much of a choice when her boss asked her to man the bar. "'The assistant manager before you made the drinks, and you'll have to take over,' he told me," Basu recalls. Although she'd learned the basics of bartending in college, she didn't know much about mixing drinks. Moreover, most cocktail ingredients weren't available in India at that time, and she didn't have a mentor. "No one gave a damn," she remembers.

Not one to give up, Shatbhi started learning the craft on her own. Her extended family in different parts of the world, especially an uncle who worked in a nightclub in London, supplied her with books and journals on bartending. She read voraciously and sought out anyone she thought "could feed this newly found focus to make a drink".

This was the time when foreign brands were just starting to come into India. Shatbhi met international brand managers visiting the country and attended their workshops, eventually learning how to make cocktails compatible with the Indian palate.

In a few years, Basu struck out on her own, conducting workshops on bartending and mixing cocktails for hotels, standalone bars and restaurants, and even interested individuals. In 1997, she started STIR Academy of Bartending in Mumbai, the first such institute in India. A pioneer, Shatbhi is today India's leading expert on alcoholic beverages.

Bartending is amongst the several specialised professional courses that have become popular of late. In the area of hospitality alone, a plain-vanilla hotel management degree is no longer the only option. If you're interested in cooking and baking, there are courses in culinary arts, where you not just get to learn international cuisines, but are also taught how to run and manage a restaurant, some bits of kitchen design and food styling, accounting, HR, web tools in food and beverage management, food sociology and anthropology, and even some conversational French.
For someone like Saransh Goila, who claims to have made his first jalebi at age 12, culinary arts was a natural choice. It changed his life forever – he went on to win the Food Food Maha Challenge, which opened the doors for him to host TV shows such as Roti Rasta Aur India and Healthy Fridge. A specialised course in culinary arts has extensive internships built into it, says Goila. It ensures a direct entry as junior chef or chef de partie. Besides, it also opens up allied professions such as food styling, food photography, food journalist, and food retailer.

"Education definitely helps, but experience is what matters", says 27-year-old Pooja Dhingra, who started Mumbai's extremely successful Le 15 Patisserie and recently penned The Big Book of Treats. "If you're homeschooled, your skills will be narrow, focused on what you like and want to learn. In a school, you get a solid base in every aspect of cooking." Dhingra herself went to Switzerland's famed Le Cordon Bleu, where she did a course in hospitality and business management.

Of course, even a few decades ago, you didn't really need a Swiss degree to start a successful confectionary business. But times have changed, and professionals are a must now, feels Gaurav Dhingra, a hotel management graduate and third generation of the family which runs Delhi's very popular Defence Bakery. "Your entire outlook changes with a professional degree. You have a greater eye for detail. Besides, if you want to do something professionally, you should do a professional course," feels Dhingra.

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Students seeking admission to Delhi University have a new favourite: forensic sciences. The course, which was launched this year in just one college, got nearly 29,000 applications. The esteemed and much sought-after English Literature course got 60,000 applications in comparison.

Make that CID in the present Indian context. The crime detective show, the longest-running on Indian television, has a diehard following across the country, and Akaash Singh of Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, is no exception. With ACP Pradyuman, the show's star detective as a role model, Akaash opted for the three-year BSc programme in forensic sciences in Amity University. He graduated last year and is already living his dream as an independent forensic expert. "I get called in for cases by the police and courts as an expert in fingerprint analysis and handwriting or document verification in forgery cases. Then there are private clients — a company that wants to verify the academic and other certificates of potential employees, or victims of crime who employ me to conduct investigations along with the police," says Singh. This January, Singh, 24, was appointed as the investigative commissioner by the Uttarakhand government and called in as an expert by the Sohna (Gurgaon) Court. On average, he earns around Rs45,000 a month.

"There's plenty of scope these days," says Ramesh Madaan, who is regarded as the founding father of private investigation in India. Madaan himself had no training in detection. "I am a simple Arts graduate from Punjab University and tried out 22 different professions before turning to detection," says Madaan, now 78, who was awarded a lifetime achievement award from the President of India in 2009. But in today's context, Madaan accepts, technical education is needed. "Crime has increased and criminals have also become tech-savvy, so you need knowledge of physics and chemistry," he says.

Agrees VC Mishra, who has been teaching forensic science at Amity University since the course was started 10 years ago, "White collar crime has increased, and even police crime branch officers need regular training. With the huge pressure of cases in courts, there is demand for experts who can prove that a signature is forged, or has been altered."