India, Feb. 13 -- At the Chandigarh Literature Festival last year, celebrity nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar dropped a bomb that set the pressure cooker hissing. Responding to a Lancet study reporting a 40-fold rise in India's ultra-processed food consumption over the past 13 years, she suggested a radical antidote: Men should cook, too. The audience gasped. Some bristled, some clapped, and at least three men reportedly checked their watches as if hoping lunchtime would miraculously disappear. In India, the kitchen is often treated as a sacred fiefdom, an emotional museum curated by mothers. The aroma of "maa ke haath ka khana" is practically a national monument. But scratch that sentimental surface and you find something far less poetic: The glorification of a woman's unacknowledged and unpaid domestic labour. We live in an era where women break glass ceilings (or at least clean around the shards), yet the gender clock remains stuck. Even with full-time careers, the responsibility to manage the kitchen falls automatically on women. Even in households with hired help, the mental load of delegating and "instruction dispensing" is a female burden. The excuses are legendary. "Women are natural nurturers." "They have the touch." No, women simply have practice. There is no kitchen chromosome tucked between X and Y. If culinary talent were genetic, half the male-dominated celebrity chef industry would have to pack up their Michelin stars and go home. The real kicker? Everyone agrees cooking is simple until men are asked to do it. Uncles who dismiss the toil look like they're decoding quantum physics when confronted with a dal recipe. This is classic weaponised incompetence-performing a task so badly that you're never asked to do it again. If cooking were truly effortless, men would do it enthusiastically. After all, men adore simple tasks like forwarding WhatsApp jokes, offering unsolicited investment tips, or hogging the remote-luxuries available only to those who aren't exhausted by meal planning. Cooking is skilled labour. It involves the "Voldemort" of domestic chores: Cleaning-the task that must not be named. Anyone who insists it's easy has either never done it or is watching a woman who has perfected it through decades of repetition. If you want to know how progressive a family truly is, don't look at their Instagram reels or political slogans. Look inside the kitchen. If mom is the only one in charge, congratulations, your family is modern only on Wi-Fi. A gender-neutral kitchen isn't about shaming men; it's about acknowledging that a professional shouldn't be expected to run a 24/7 catering service at home. Last year's film Mrs cracked open the physical toll of these rituals, showing that while on-screen patriarchy trembles, off-screen men still think helping means asking, "What's for dinner?" It is time to rewrite the quiet architecture of power. Let the mantra be clear: Whoever eats, cooks. Whoever cooks, cleans. And whoever claims it's simple gets full responsibility for the next 24 hours of meal prep. Real partnership isn't found in a grand gesture; it's found standing over a chopping board, apron on, finally doing one's fair share....