Meghalaya's MasterChef runner-up Nambie Marak is also an entrepreneur. Here is her story

Shillong: For as long as she can remember, 35-year-old Nambie Marak from the Khasi Hills region of Meghalaya has loved to cook.

Her mother, being a local entrepreneur, encouraged Marak to learn the nitty gritty of basic cooking as she was often busy with her work. “My father was a government servant with a very basic salary. Therefore, to make ends meet, my mother would weave shawls and other traditional Garo wear for our locality. As she urged me to become self-relief, I learned how to put together a simple two-course meal during my early teens”, Marak, who would go on to represent Northeast in Season 8 of MasterChef India, tells Business North East, recalling her beginnings. 

However, Marak did not hone her craft until much later - when she was pursuing a degree in Communication from the famed Madras Christian College in Chennai. “In South India, I mostly had to make do with dosas and biryani.  I eventually tired of those dishes and started longing for our own Northeast Indian food. Finally, I decided to learn how to cook my own food by learning recipes from the internet."

Just as Marak was putting the finishing touches on her culinary skills, she started a social media platform ‘Eat Your Kappa’ chronicling her experiments with Northeast Indian food and “everything else that was nice”, Marak informed this platform. The rest, as they say, is history.

Since its inception in 2016, Eat Your Kappa has become an online phenomenon and currently boasts almost 50,000 followers on video video-sharing platform YouTube. “After the success of my channel, I got a lot of coverage in regional as well as national media. It was the MasterChef team that reached out to me and asked if I wanted to participate. I grabbed the opportunity with both hands as I have been a longtime fan of all the versions of the long-running cooking show.”

Marak recalls having a MasterChef-like experience in her Shillong school, Pine Mount. “Our school was ICSE medium and we had Home Science classes. It was a mini-MasterChef in the sense that we would be given kits and themes according to which we had to cook meals and present them to the teachers. In a way, that experience perhaps prepared me for my experience with MasterChef”, Marak reflects.

After multiple rounds of silent auditions in Kolkata and a cook-off, Marak found herself making her way to Mumbai where she also aced the audition rounds. “From the very outset, I saw MasterChef as an opportunity to showcase our Northeast Indian cuisine. When I made the top 12, I thought it was a big deal. After that, I was in the top 10, and I thought the goal was getting much closer. And I kept moving further ahead and onward in the show”, Marak says.

Marak describes the MasterChef experience as an “incredible journey” as she got to showcase some incredible Northeast Indian dishes. Married to a man from Tamil Nadu, Marak made her mark on the show by fusing Northeast Indian dishes with their South Indian counterparts for an eclectic blend. “Garo dish galda, sticky rice with black sesame, regular tomato fish gravy”, says Marak, rattling off the names of dishes she liked exhibiting best on the show.

Meeting Marco Pierre White, the first British chef to be awarded three Michelin stars, was the highlight of Marak’s experience on MasterChef India. Recalling the episode, she says, “The day he came, I was safe and there was no need for me to cook. However, I sacrificed my safety and made kiwi rasam - another fusion of Northeast and South India - for White. He lauded my commitment and remarked that ‘fortune favours the brave’.” 

At the end of it all, Marak emerged as the runner-up to Mohammed Ashiq from Karnataka. Does she have any regrets? “Not at all. All the contestants, including myself, felt they had a winning chance. In the finale, I was a hair’s breadth away from being declared the winner and that is something that I can take pride in. The day I entered the top 12, I was already a winner in my own eyes.”

So what comes next for the MasterChef runner-up?

Marak, who was an Assistant Professor at her college, has moved back to her village – Upper Rangsa in West Khasi Hills – with her professor husband. “I had to come back with my daughter to take care of my mother as she recently suffered a nasty fall as I belong to a matrilineal society. My husband also gave up his fairly comfortable job to be with us and we have started our very own venture here in the village.”

Their sparsely-populated village lies right in the “middle of a jungle”, Marak says, and the couple is growing lemongrass, a commercial crop, on their 6-acre farm.

“Lemongrass gives very good oil and is used extensively in South East Asian countries for cooking. We are distilling oil from the lemongrass and plans are afoot to sell it all over the country. We are also looking to partner up with Amazon and other major e-commerce sites to distribute our product”, says Marak.

At the same time, she is also selling pickles through her social media platforms and says it is her “dream” to see them being sold all over the country.

“We came here to start a new life”, says Marak.

Although the newer products are sold under the brand name ‘A'kawe’, they still bear the ‘Eat Your Kappa’ logo which first launched Marak into culinary stardom.

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