Vikram
Vij is a Vancouver chef, author and television personality.
> What’s the best book you’ve read this year and why?
The book is called Flame, and it is the story of a woman named Shahnaz Husain, who built an empire of beauty salons in India. She is the flame: through all the storms life brought her, not one could douse her spark of free spirit.
> What book can’t you wait to dive into?
I want to read Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts again. It is such a fun read, and I love the incredibly vivid portrait it paints of Bombay.
> What’s your favourite book of all time?
Without a shadow of a doubt, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.
> What book completely changed your perspective?
You might think an autobiography wouldn’t change your own perspective, but my own book – Vij: A Chef’s OneWay Ticket to Canada With Indian Spices in His Suitcase – did just that. It made me stop and realize what I’d achieved; it made me take time to look over my mistakes and failures and to recognize the journey I had come on. It completely changed my own view of myself, even though I’d already lived it. Sometimes you really do need to take time to smell the roses.
> If you could have dinner with any author, living or dead, who would it be?
Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Michelle Obama. And I’d just cook and let them all do the talking. I think listening to everything they would say would absolutely change the world!