If there were a Met Gala for books, Taste (conceptualised by journalist Lakshmi Chaudhry and published by Juggernaut) would have undoubtedly turned heads on the red carpet. Retailing at ₹15,000, this set of two hefty volumes comes in a peachy-pink cardboard shell. Once you’ve unboxed the cargo, the oversized books—one edited by Chaudhry, the other by designer Tania Singh Khosla—are embellished with bells and whistles serious enough to give competition to Cardi B’s costume this year.
For not only is each volume of Taste heavily illustrated, the images also come in a variety of forms: embossed, gold-tinted, as cut-outs, poster folds, meant to be viewed through multi-coloured lenses, and full of quaint quirks that would gladden the heart of anyone invested in the book as a decorative object rather than a medium of intellectual engagement. Taste is not meant to live on shelves; it is meant to be displayed on a bespoke coffee table, preferably made by a Japanese master carpenter, considering the limited edition of 500 copies that have been released.
Indeed, exclusivity is the calling card for Taste. In her introduction, Chaudhry informs the reader that this anthology will be an annual project. The idea behind it is to rebel against the algorithm-driven markers of taste that social media platforms keep pushing on to our feeds. Taste aims to serve as a counterpoint to the flattening homogeneity of our desires, creating a pocket of reprieve in a world perpetually distracted.
“After a decades-long news career spent wading through wars, terrorism, pandemics and genocide, I ached to create something of beauty and meaning in a world greatly short on both,” as Chaudhry puts it. “Gaza was a tipping point (too many dead babies). Worn by the daily fare of the dire, I wanted to throw a great feast for the mind and eye—to delight myself as much as you. This is extremism of an entirely different kind.”
Extreme, indeed, is this project, self-indulgent and flippant by turn. Designed by Kriti Monga, the ensemble of images and texts resembles a lovechild between Sabyasachi’s maximalism and Good Earth bling. The design notes at the end of each piece explain, in painstaking detail, the thinking behind the choice of imagery, fonts, and so on, leaving nothing to the imagination. The multitude of typographical flourishes makes the reading experience choppy. (At times, one isn’t able to tell whether a text block is meant to be a pull quote or belongs to the piece.) There are abrupt interludes where artists like Mithu Sen, Subodh Gupta and others offer quick takes on their idea of taste. These interventions feel frilly rather than substantive, offering broad strokes on artistic sensibilities that are too complex to summarise in a paragraph or two.
If the first volume has its moments of interest (though the choice of the writers, topics and its overall point doesn’t get much clearer), the second one, titled Time + Space, has little going for itself other than visual excess. Khosla traces the circuitous, often violently imperialist, histories of four arbitrary objects—the pineapple, Madras checks, cummerbund and bandhani. The material could have been engaging in its exploration of the link between a checkered past and a textured present. Unfortunately, the entries read like Wikipedia lite, with occasional raptures about their afterlife in haute couture (Shah Rukh Khan’s cummerbund at last year’s Met Gala is hailed as one such exhibit).
On the whole, the project seems to present itself as an expensive plaything rather than a deep dive into a layered idea, though some of the essays and interviews do elevate its quality.
New encounters
The first volume of Taste opens with an intriguing essay by writer and translator Srinath Perur, who traces the raging popularity of the German band Boney M in India, among other places, for nearly half a century. From Haliyal, a small town in Karnataka, in 1978 to the present day, when the band came to perform in Shillong in 2024, he traces a slice of music history that is also a commentary on the evolution of taste among listeners in India. Apart from offering his theory behind the undiminished fandom of the band, Perur draws attention to little-known details: the fact that songs like Sunny and Rivers of Babylon have a much darker origin than most of us imagine. While analysing the adoption of Boney M’s disco beats in Indian society, he also takes a fascinating detour into the dynamics of class that enabled access and formed the tastes of an entire generation of music aficionados.
Such moments of discovery expand the scope of the idea of taste. As critic and writer Parul Sehgal puts it in her interview with Kannada writer Vivek Shanbhag, “(Taste) can be the ability to arrange oneself to be present for an encounter, to grapple with the unknown.” Her definition becomes an entry point for writer Aatish Taseer, who, in his essay, reflects on the muzak-like sameness adopted by the monied classes in contemporary India when it comes to interior design.
As luxury condos and penthouses mushroom in Indian metros, Taseer notes a growing preference for a five-star-hotel-style decor, where curated floral arrangements, decorative art, and ambient lighting replace personal idiosyncrasies and unique touches that once lent “character” to a space. Instead of the allure of the unknown, the privileged Indian now seeks comfort in the universal. The flat uniformity of their living rooms could belong to anywhere—Dubai or New York.
Nobel laureate economist Abhijit Banerjee, also a food connoisseur, reflects on adding a personal touch in culinary innovations in his conversation with four eminent chefs and restaurateurs—Manu Chandra, Garima Arora, Prateek Sadhu and Thomas Zacharias. While there are illuminating moments in this exchange, we don’t really learn much that we haven’t heard before.
The other interview in the anthology, between Shanbhag and Sehgal, is edgier, with the former bringing seriousness and candour to the conversation to explore questions of multilinguality, translation and readership. Shanbhag’s take on Jhumpa Lahiri’s work in English versus her recent books in Italian is sharp, as are his views on the delicate art of translation. There is a reassuring gravitas in the slow deliberation of this dialogue, where the quest for quality takes precedence over quantity.
The most enjoyable piece, in terms of design as well as text, is Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s sojourn across Europe, as she plants herself among a group of Indian tourists on a guided tour of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge country. With just the right touch of cynicism and pathos, the essay becomes much more than a travelogue—a bittersweet analysis of what it means to be “a citizen of the world”. Living in Berlin for several years, fluent in German but still unsure of her place in the social milieu of Europe, Madhavan finds herself drawn to, as well as alienated from, her compatriots. As the rambunctious tourists enjoy dal and rice in the land of schnitzels and sauerkraut, take selfies in skimpy clothes in freezing cold and, at the end of the tour, are left underwhelmed, the writer comes away with more epiphanies than she had perhaps bargained for.
The piece becomes a sobering example of a sentiment expressed by Shanbhag in the book: “Our greatest challenge today is the lack of awareness of our own taste.”