THE GREAT INDIAN KITCHEN MOVIE REVIEW CLICK TO RATE THE MOVIE

There is a reason why Jeo Baby's The Great Indian Kitchen has been set up at the pace at which it has been set up. The drab, dreary routine that a newly married woman - a brillaint Nimisha Sajayan as er I forget and I have a valid explanation - she is among the scores of women around us, chained to the kitchen and their lives revolving around the men in their lives despite whatever education they may have had or hobbies they can excel at, finds herself in, should start getting to the viewers. 

Nimisha has her task cut out from dawn to dusk with the men hardly lifting even their little finger to help but the complaints stay - don't cook food in the cooker, firewood is better; don't wash my clothes in the washing machine, a hand run is better; I am not dissuading you from going to work, I will decide when it should be - so on and so forth. 

Even if she is found conversing with others, say her mom, for example, both women are seen engaging in household work as they do so while the men are at leisure when not eating and making complaints about the food. The irony is such that Nimisha's husband Suraj Venjaramoodu, again his character name doesn't stay in our minds, is a school teacher, extemporizing on subjects such as "family values" while the women at his household get a raw deal. To give the devil its due and to go by a cliché, an apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

The men here don't explode with anger but with their soft manners "condition" the women, maybe coming across as all the more dangerous. Nimisha finds herself not even being at liberty to joke about her husband's table manners and is gaslighted into apologizing to him. She asking her husband to indulge in a bit of foreplay as coitus is a painful experience for her is brushed aside too.

What happens post all this? Is Nimisha able to rise above the patriarchy? Do the men in her lives change for the better or to borrow another cliché, leopards don’t change their spots? The Great Indian Kitchen has the answers to these in such a hard-hitting manner that even you are forced to take a hard look and reexamine the women in your lives and give some food for thought on is everything being okay in paradise or paradise is on the verge of being lost or is already lost.

The film also throws light on the taboos of menstruation that sadly exist in a society that has clocked 20 + years into the millennium. 

Nimisha Sajayan is the life and soul of The Great Indian Kitchen and just like the broth she boils, you are left wondering when she is going to fly off the lid, this time, in a good way. Suraj Venjaramoodu lends able support and is the blue print of the average Indian men, conditioned neatly in the 12 steps of patriarchy.

Particular praise needs to be directed towards cinematographer Salu K. Thomas. Thanks to him, the tantalizing shots of food soon become a horror and nightmare to watch as we begin to realize the torment the women are made to undergo. Cooking isn’t just about taste and presentation, there is a massive cleaning exercise that follows, that most men or at least the ones in The Great Indian Kitchen seem oblivious to, among other things.