In India, one popular airline’s slogan is: Come for the flights, stay for the hotels.
Something similar captures my one-line summary of Chhaunk: Come for Abhijit’s economic insights and food recipes; stay back for Cheyenne’s artworks.
I got curious about the book even before it was published. Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, an Economics Nobel laureate, started writing a column in The Sunday Times of India. Each article blended a kitchen recipe with related (or not so related) economics insights. The illustrations accompanying the column were done by a French illustrator, Cheyenne Olivier.
The prose was attractive, the illustrations superb. Abhijit, being a Marathi-Bengali cross product (Marathi mom, Bengali dad), has some decent Marathi and Bengali food recipes. The recipes are drawn from all corners of the globe, though. It is not limited to Maharashtra/Bengal or India.
The economics felt good too, especially on the days when my views matched those of Abhijit. I knew that the columns would become a book someday, and I knew I would be buying one for myself.
The book came out in 2024. I bought it in 2025. Finished reading it in February 2026. I loved the drawings by Cheyenne Olivier, liked some topics while learning some fun stuff, and heartily disagreed with quite a few views. Let me organise my review sections accordingly.
Illustrations by Cheyenne Olivier
She has a distinctive drawing style which I love. Apart from that, there are lots of painstaking details in each drawing, which I love to find out.
Look at the one introducing the chapter titled “women and work”. Lots of detail that I loved to discover:
- The lady in the middle with six hands. Giving a many-handed goddess vibe.
- Hand#1 is putting clothes to dry. Hand#2 is feeding a bird (sparrow?). Hand#3 is sweeping the floor with a broom. Hand#4 is holding a baby in her lap. Hand#5 is cooking. I’m confused about hand #6, though. Is it holding up the roof?
- The clips to attach the clothes to the drying line are shown meticulously.
- Some sort of veggies are growing on the roof.
- Two kids are peeking from behind their mum.
- The lady is shown dressed up for work on the right side of the picture. The listless wisp of hair has been carefully made up into a thicker strand; the saree is covering the back of her head. This was exactly the style of Bengali office-goer ladies in the second half of the twentieth century.
On a different note, page 197 is an intriguing illustration. It shows three seated gentlemen. I couldn’t understand the relevance of this picture to its chapter titled “Landscapes and Foodscapes”. Are the three gentlemen representing three different culinary cultures? The leftmost is Chinese? Is the middle gentleman Indian? Which nationality is the gentleman on the right? He is not even eating.
Learnings and fun stuff courtesy Abhijit
Page xii: In the introductory author note, Abhijit writes "we hope the reading will inspire you to cook, and the cooking to read further." That’s a smart line.
Page 114: A breed of free-market economists from Chicago used to call themselves free-market-marxists. That’s hilarious! Let me not break the mystery of why they assumed such a split-personality identity.
Page 176: The political complexities and difficulties, along with culinary variation within different parts of China, are nicely explained.
Page 185-188 “The paradox of cake 🧁”: This is one nice and happy chapter. Somehow this chapter made me feel Abhijit wrote this with a smile on his lips and mind. I myself broke into medium-loud laughter a couple of times. The enigma remains. Why does the PLAAM cake cost one rupee more than the CHRISHMASH cake?
Disagreements
Page 6, 52: Affirmative action: A government or an institute’s job is to be the best at what is their primary role. Not to erase inequality. Even if there is a cultural-capital gap in kids growing up, and that gap bothers you, then volunteer to provide the same ‘cultural capital’ for disadvantaged kids. And reduce the gap. Don’t hamper the institute from seeking its full potential. If Harvard’s focus is to be best in academics, then it should not be tasked with erasing inequality in society by doing positive discrimination.
Abhijit professes his support for affirmative action and seems to de-emphasise merit as a selection criterion. It need not be an either-or. There can be solutions where neither merit nor culture-capital-induced disadvantage is compromised. I could not clearly understand what steps Abhijit means to take for affirmative action.
Page 103: Abhijit refers to the Russia-Ukraine war as Putin’s war. This is controversial. Putin believes NATO forced his hand. By that PoV, the war should be called a NATO war.
Page 134: He talks about the importance of a mutual support system to prevent extreme hunger. He writes about how hunger paralyses us mentally. And does not want to leave hunger management to free markets. I agree. I would leave it to society, i.e. voluntary charity. Abhijit doesn’t want to leave such a dire hunger situation to charity and wants government intervention. I cannot agree with this amount of trust in governments whose spending paradigm is “someone else’s money for someone else’s benefit”.
Page 172: The topic touches on the economic downfall of Kolkata leading to the exodus of the Chinese community from Kolkata to upcoming economic powerhouses of Southeast Asia like Singapore. While discussing the downfall, Abhijit, I suspect, craftily avoids laying the blame on the communist government and the harmful leftist policies. He uses the weasel term “industrial strife”, which doesn’t explain who/what caused that strife. I suspect he does this because he is himself a leftist and doesn’t have the humility to question his own biases in the search for truth.
Page 213: A juvenile dig at Elon Musk. I am shocked that Abhijit is indeed this ignorant about the stock-based wealth of the billionaires. Or is he trying to rile people up like the cheapest left-leaning politicians? This was extremely disappointing.
Page 301: Philanthropy is not enough for poverty alleviation. Government may have to kick in. That is the theme of this chapter. This runs against my bias. But it seems Abhijit is not even trying to debate the topic in this chapter. He is dancing around the subject, dropping important data points and hitting the best humour one can find in the book. An immensely entertaining chapter despite my disagreement.
All in all, an interesting book. I recommend it for the drawings and the fun economic digressions, while remaining deeply sceptical of Abhijit’s leftist leanings.
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