Two days a week I do sales enablement consulting. The other five belong to Chom Chom Pantry.
The consulting days have a particular quality — focused, bounded, professional. I show up, I think hard, I deliver, I’m done. Clean edges. I like that about them.
The Chom Chom days are different. I’ll be in the kitchen testing a recipe at 7am and still thinking about packaging copy at 10pm — not because I have to be, but because I can’t quite stop. That’s not overwork. That’s just what it feels like when the thing you’re building is also the thing you want.
There’s a difference between doing work that is impressive and doing work that is yours. Between a job that demands everything and a business where you are the one deciding what everything means.
Most mornings the walk is first, regardless of which kind of day it is. Back by 7:30, tea, dogs, desk. On a Chom Chom day the desk might have recipe notes on it, or packaging proofs, or a spreadsheet of spice ratios I’ve been refining for three weeks. (The current obsession, if you’re wondering, is in the shop.)
On a consulting day it has a slide deck and a client brief and a meeting in forty minutes.
Both are real work. Both matter. But only one of them makes me lose track of time in the way that means something.
The estate — one acre of tea bushes and kitchen garden in Kotagiri, in the Nilgiris — holds both versions of me without complaint. The hills look the same whether I’m on a Teams call or elbow-deep in shortbread dough. Barnaby, the bison, doesn’t care either way.
That feels right, somehow.
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Chom Chom Pantry · Kotagiri, Nilgiris
