Catch The Big Forkers on YouTube

There’s been much to disagree about this year, but there’s one thing we can all come to a consensus on — year 2020 goes to the artists — the creative folk who have made every day a little more colourful sometimes even in the least poetic way of having just about anything to do to kill time. TikTok made days scroll by faster, and Youtube made them a little more productive — shout out to banana bread and dalgona coffee (feel like last year).

While online consumption is at its peak, the consequences of the lockdown have turned the global state of food and travel television into a bowl of stale porridge - pale, bland, and unappealing. But why just blame this pandemic, the post-Bourdain world has become dystopian and Bipolar, one where the miasma of PC driven cancel-culture looms large on anything out of order, pumping out safe cookie cutter shows or some that are just all shocks and no likes. This is where our protagonists, Sid and Shanky decided they want to rock the f*kin boat a bit. Simply put, The Big Forkers is a show that was born from the absolute lack of wit and f*ckwittery, experimentation and authenticity, of culture in the food exploration domain this year. One half (the bigger one, they’d say) of the big forkers is Sid Mewara - an investment banker, with a culinary education - who hails from India, was bred in the US, lives in China, and spends three hundred days of the year travelling the globe; and the other half (the funnier one, they’d say) is Shashank Jayakumar, a serial entrepreneur who advises at the World Bank when he’s not riding along adventures, eating his way through the country.

They don’t always agree but they share one strong opinion - Our country has enough unappetizing day-time TV shows to power the rest of the millenium and that food and travel enthusiasts can be spared this blandness of character. 

 They decided to team up with Vidit Chitroda and Prithwish Barman at Madness Picture Company to beat The Big Forkers into its frenzied, provocative, uncensored, brutal subversive existence.  

 TBF started its journey earlier this year with their pilot season shot in the midst of Mumbai’s bustling nightlife and eateries. An exercise of jumping in both feet first, the season is a trial, a rinse & repeat of brute force. Fortitude in the time of COVID. 

 The main hook of this show is molded in a format that frees the foodie in all of us with uncensored, relatable banter over exploring food, culture, politics, history and more. While their reviews of cafes, restaurants and bars are brutally honest, they seem to distance themselves from the Ramsay syndrome, which can be a good thing unless you’re looking for scrambled eggs. 

 It is with this attitude, arrogance, and self-righteous indignation that they have set out to create a dialogue, a hunger for something new, or a hankering for something familiar, to instigate a conversation and urge people to eat, travel and learn about others. Tune into their show on YouTube to watch these big forkers, and their big appetites, live life by their only mantra — you can share culture with stories, but you can only indulge in culture with food.