Kitchen utensils : Engraving names & chronicling stories across generations

#27 - Kitchen utensils become blindspots, but they hold so much more beyond food. They are vessels of stories and memories. They are trusted companions across generations for most Indian households.

Kitchen utensils are timekeepers in an Indian household. They are not just vessels of preparing and serving delicacies, but chroniclers of time and onlookers of emotional crests and troughs of a family over generations. We don’t just inherit utensils, we inherit memories and countless stories.

A pressure cooker, while whistling its way to prepare delicious dal, can transport us to a time when it was used for the first time : maybe by grandparents in the 1960s.

It gives a showreel of a time when resources were modest, but families were bigger; when cooking was laborious, but eating together was a ritual; when appetites were bigger, yet waists were modest. It gives us the context of contrast between then and now, but also shares the common threads of continuity.

The same pressure cooker could have played an important role in our parents' lives. It would have seen them as young, energetic people, full of life. It would have seen them in their vulnerable moments, their expression of love or their disagreements. These are stages of our parents lives, we never got to witness, something that made them more human. The closest we ever come to this is through a glimpse of some old photograph kept in a forgotten album, tucked away in some corner of the house.

Utensils may seem like commodities. But they aren’t. They are brands. They are personalized assets made unique by the signature branding on them : the engraving of name and date of its entry in the family. Is this gesture still prevalent? Do people engrave names while buying a new utensil? As we purchase most things online, is it a gesture that’s becoming extinct? Or will a service provider build on this nostalgia and create an unexpected delight? Maybe someone already is.

Utensils are signature souvenirs of our home that we bring with us while building life in a new city.  These utensils become the journal of the ups and downs of this new life : the first chai, the undercooked curry, the overcooked rice or the shapeless roti. On a silent solitary night,they miraculously add pages to take down new stories.

They add our stories to the existing journal of family tales and remind us of something precious. They remind us that the previous generations might have gone through a difficult night like this. It eventually turned out alright. This little portal joins multiple generations together. A portal that comes to life through that little engraving at the bottom corner.