Rupak D Sharma in Bangkok
Asia News Network
Publication Date : 29-01-2010
Vinder Balbir Thakral, aka Mrs Balbir, has overcome all traumas in her life to become one of the best Indian cuisine chefs in Thailand
On a recent Saturday morning, Vinder Balbir Thakral got off the motorcycle taxi and rushed into her restaurant in Bangkok’s tourist hub of Nana apologising.
“I’m so sorry, I completely forgot about the appointment,” the moderately built 53-year-old said smiling in the most engaging fashion.
She was supposed to appear for this interview at 11am but by the time she had reached the restaurant it was almost 11:30.
“You know, we had a party last night. Then some of my friends suggested we go and watch this movie Avatar. So I went to bed quite late,” the owner of one of the most famous and oldest Indian restaurants in the Thai capital said, explaining the delay.
Running a restaurant can take a toll on personal life, especially if it is in cases like that of Vinder’s where people she knows on a personal basis form the core of her clientele. Certainly, the quality of food matters the most but you also need to learn how to frame your life around entertaining guests till the end of the day. Failing to do so may translate into losing customers’ support.
“It’s a tough work, you know, and you need lots of patience,” said Vinder, a Malaysian who has been living in Thailand for more than 30 years now.
Born Harvinder Kaur, Vinder’s life has revolved around her restaurant – Mrs Balbir—for almost three decades now. To her this is home and school. It is a place where she learnt how to cook Indian food. This is a place where her toddler turned into a man and her love and respect for her husband grew even stronger. And it is also the place where she transformed herself from an ‘ignorant girl’ in the restaurant sector to a ‘star-like figure’, who now goes around advising people how to create menus and run businesses.
Looking back Vinder feels contented, as the time and efforts she has put into her venture has paid off. Today, she proudly claims she has a following of more than 5,000 loyal customers, and north Indian cuisines, such as butter chicken masala, tandoori (clay oven) items, thalis and even masala milk tea, made in her kitchen are considered as among the best in Thailand.
But like in the case of many successful entrepreneurs, her journey to the top has not been an easy one.
“When we first opened up, Indian food was not popular in Thailand,” Vinder said. “Thais hated the smell of the spices that we used.”
The only people who used to visit her restaurant were expatriates and “very few Thais mostly educated in England”. “Although there were many Indians living around in Bangkok at that time they lived a very frugal life and the culture of eating out was not there,” she said.
There were times when she thought she had made a wrong decision by opening up an Indian cuisine restaurant in a country where Indian dishes were abhorred. “In such times, I just wanted to close down for good and look for alternatives,” she said.
But Vinder had an obsessive zeal, like that of a crusader, which provided her the fodder to fight. Nonetheless, her resoluteness was always challenged and life didn’t stop testing her. She felt this when her 11-year-old daughter who was suffering from kidney disease died after three months in coma.
“That was the lowest moment in my life,” she said. “Having spent almost all of our money on her treatment, I had nothing left to give to my staff, and payments of utility bills and rents were pending.”
Vinder was now left with no other choice than closing down the restaurant. And she did.
“I felt as if life had closed all its doors on me,” she said. But instead of asking why the doors were closed she asked what she could do to reopen them. And within a month she sprung back into action and managed to arrange some loans to reopen the restaurant. Her staff members were supportive as well, which made things a lot easier for her. This was a new beginning for her and since then she has never had those impulse of switching profession.
“By then I had learnt how to overcome all my fear. I knew I had to face the devil to solve problems rather than run away from it,” she said in a resolute voice.
It so happens that for most of her life, what Vinder knew best were fear and a feeling of devils pounding on her.
Born in Kuala Lumpur to parents of Indian origin, Vinder had lost both her parents during the 1969 racial riots in Malaysia, which took lives of 196 people. As an orphan, she was then sent to Catholic boarding schools—first in Pahang and later in Malacca—by her grandfather and uncles, who were her only guardians.
“I lived an awful life there,” Vinder said. “The nuns were very cold and strict and we were allowed to go home only once a year.” But she acknowledged it was at this school in Malacca where she was first introduced to the art of cooking – beginning with pastries and pizza.
After she graduated from high school, her grandfather sent her off to Bangkok to get married. She was only 17 then but there was no way she could disobey her grandfather since shooing off the girls from the homes at an early age was a very common practice among Indian families in those days.
Her husband, Balbir Thakral, who was around 26 then, was “doing odd jobs to make ends meet”. Though she fell in love with him in their first meeting, he didn’t have a career then. “In fact, he had nothing—not even a bank account,” said Vinder chuckling like a teenager.
But together they did everything to keep the household running—from teaching English to Thais for 50 baht (US$1.5 according to current exchange rate) an hour to making pizzas at home, which her husband used to deliver to homes on his motorcycle—until they opened their own restaurant which bears her husband’s name, Balbir.
“One thing that I’ve learnt from life is that it does not matter what has happened to you. What matters is how you come out of it. That makes you a champion,” said Vinder, who is a vegetarian and likes to meditate and perform yoga. And considering how she has emerged unscathed from life’s bullying, she is a champion.
Today she not only handles her restaurant but creates her own food recipe, designs menu for restaurants and hotels and travels around the world as a visiting Indian chef. She also has a cooking studio where she or chefs invited from hotels around the world conduct cooking classes not only on Indian dishes but Moroccan, Brazilian and Italian dishes. On top of that she also provides consultancy service to Thai Airways on in-flight catering, particularly on Indian dishes.
Vinder also wears the hat of television hostess and she successfully ran her own cooking show Bangkok Spice with Mrs Balbir for 16 years on Channel 21. She also had a stint on Star Plus’ Travel Asia show.
“Now, I’m planning to write a cook book with my life story in it,” Vinder, who likes to travel and read lots of self-improvement books, said.
What about retirement plans?
“I don’t believe in the word called retirement,” she said. “I believe in growing and moving on even if you are 60, 70 or 80. Because the day you stop, you die.”Published in AsiaNews Jan 29 – Feb 11 2010
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