Rintu Rathod
I am a commercial designer turned designer baker. I try to spread awareness and help people through my art and my medium of art and expression is my cakes. I have tried to create awareness on the subjects like Save the girl child and Food waste through my cakes. I have been making edible Ganesha idol for the last 4 years to send out the message of real celebration of festivals. Edible idols save the environment and more importantly help in feeding the underprivileged children. For me, real celebration is when no one sleeps hungry.
I have started an organisation called The Food Army, where every member contributes 25 homemade theplas (spicy Indian flat bread, which can last for 7 days) during any calamity in the country. This way we had sent 35,000 Theplas to Kashmir last year during floods. This year we sent 1,00000 Theplas to the Nepal earthquake victims in just one day. The most unique part about The Food Army is it doesn’t accept any money from anybody, just 25 theplas.
Sharing Food…Sharing Hope with Rintu Rathod #isharehope Episode 71
Summary: Rintu’s answer to the five questions! Listen to the full conversation on the player above; also available on iTunes and Stitcher.
Question 1: How do you define hope or what is your favorite quote about hope?
Rintu Rathod:
“When you really want to do something, the entire universe conspires to help you achieve that goal. You just need to have faith, you just need to have hope…”
Question 2: Who has shared the most hope with you?
Rintu Rathod:
The first is my husband. Generally, I have not seen any other person so positive, so stable in life. Once I was a very negative person in life and we have been married for the last 18 years. Whatever I have changed now, I would like to give all the credit to him.
Swami Vivekananda. I’m a big follower of him. His books are like fire. His words are like fire. You read a book and it gives you so much strength, so much power.
Question 3: How have you used hope to make it through a difficult time in your life?
Rintu Rathod:
There are many incidents, of course when you lose your loved ones – those are the difficult times. My husband helped me go through those times with his positivity.
A recent example, I started an organization called The Food Army. We collect home-cooked roti and send it to the affected areas, wherever there is a calamity that happened. What happened at that time is we sent a message at WhatsApp and it went wild. We had asked them to inform us before sending these rotis, but people just started coming with huge boxes of rotis. We had commissioned a certain amount from the airline and suddenly they said that they cannot take these rotis to Nepal. It was for the Nepal earthquake. There were very huge quantities of roti and it was not just about food. They were sending their hopes, their prayers through their food. I couldn’t sleep the entire night because I could not let that go to waste. I cannot do that, but somehow every time I believe that whatever the situation is right now, it is going to happen…We will find a way tomorrow morning. We will send it anyhow. It is going to be done. The next morning, another airline called and they said they will take the entire consignment and they will deliver it free for us.
Question 4: How are you sharing hope today?
Rintu Rathod:
I’m an artist first, so I convey my thoughts and my messages through my art and my medium is my cakes. I made a baby cake abandoned in some trash. The motive behind this campaign was justice. People were asking me “How can you cut this cake? It’s a baby.” I said “are you feeling so much for this cake? Why don’t you do something for the real girls?”
I started this organization, The Food Army. The idea is whenever there is calamity, the army reaches them first, they distribute biscuits and all – so, how long can you survive on those biscuits? The ideal is to reach out to these people with home-cooked food, cooked with positivity and prayers. That makes all the difference.
Whatever I do, it has to be collective effort and no money involved and for the good of the society.
Question 5: How should I (the listener) begin to grow in hope or share hope today?
Rintu Rathod:
(1) Believe in yourself and believe in God.
(2) Think positive.
(3) Be happy.
