When the Mic Falls Silent, the Karahi Takes Over: BBC’s Former India Chief Is Now Jaipur’s Most Talked-About Kachori Seller
Sanjeev Srivastava — the man who once set the editorial agenda for one of the world’s most trusted broadcasters — has walked away from the newsroom and into a kitchen. His new beat? Bikaner-style kachoris in the Pink City.
There is a certain poetry in watching a man who spent nearly four decades decoding the world’s most complex stories now devote his mornings to perfecting the precise oil temperature for a deep-fried snack. But for Sanjeev Srivastava, former India Head of BBC Hindi, the move makes complete sense.
His shop, Throwback Desi, sits quietly on Mangal Marg in Bapu Nagar, Jaipur — a modest counter that carries, perhaps, the weight of the most unconventional career pivot Indian journalism has ever produced. Srivastava, who first walked into the BBC in 1994 and went on to become the first non-British person to lead its India operations, says the idea was born not from burnout but from a lifelong love of food and a quiet frustration with marketplace quality. He had always adored kachoris — particularly those rooted in Bikaner’s deep culinary heritage — but had long been wary of buying them from unknown vendors. After years of having them privately prepared, he asked himself a simple question: why not do it properly and share the pleasure with others?
The answer took six months of shop renovation, recipe refinement, and logistical groundwork to materialise. He admits the road was not without its bumps, but says the venture is finding its footing.
Yet even as he rolls out dough, Srivastava has not set aside the journalist in him. He maintains a YouTube channel where he continues to offer the kind of measured, unspun analysis that defined his BBC years. The response, however, has been sobering. Subscriber numbers remain modest — and he is candid about why.
“We live in an extremely polarised world,” he has said. “People want content that validates what they already believe. Audiences today are either firmly in one camp or the other, and they seek out voices that speak to their tribe. Journalism that refuses to take sides — that simply tries to illuminate rather than inflame — finds very little room in that landscape. Unbiased reporting has no natural home in a world that thinks in absolutes.”
It is a quiet lament from a man who built his career on precisely that: holding the middle ground when everyone else was rushing to the edges. The low subscriber count, he suggests, is not a reflection of quality but of the times — an era in which nuance struggles to compete with outrage.
And so Sanjeev Srivastava occupies a curious and rather admirable position: serving truth on one screen and kachoris across a counter, doing both without compromise, and letting the world catch up when it is ready.
As he himself put it, respect follows the work — not the title. Whether that work involves a studio light or a frying pan seems, to him, entirely beside the point.
Throwback Desi is located on Mangal Marg, Bapu Nagar, Jaipur.
