He just didn’t do catering college. That was enough for Sanjeev Kapoor to be the King of the Kitchen. To understand what it meant to go on TV and be the Master Chef who entered peoples living rooms and changed their eating habits, he actually enrolled in a management school and studied the basics between sales and marketing.

In a podcast powered by Reliance Digital and given to PeepingMoon.com’s Mark Manuel, Sanjeev laughingly admitted he was the oldest student at the prestigious NMIMS in Mumbai in the mid-1990s. “I didn’t finish the course because I was too busy by then with my hotel job. But I learned what I did not know – that is about the consumer. Since this was a TV show, ‘Khana Khazana’, the consumer was the audience.”

He learned to realise that people watched his show not just for an enjoyable experience, but to learn something. In every episode on ‘Khana Khazana’ Sanjeev was teaching his audience, mainly fascinated housewives, another of his signature dishes. “It was an instructional show. And that meant teaching. A good teacher is one who can speak well, communicate, and hold the viewer’s interest. I cracked that code by putting a little empathy in my talk and a big smile on my face,” he says, revealing the success of his show.