107-Year-Old Mastanamma, Loved For Her YouTube Cooking Show, Dies
107-year-old Mastanamma dies leaving behind her country recipes.
A real star in this age of over hyped celebrity, Mastanamma is a person of heroic grit. Her passion for cooking shone through her personal struggles. Mastanamma married at age of 11 years, became a widow and mother of five at 22 years.
And she did.
Mastanamma worked as a labourer to support her children and then as cook in a restaurant. Her own country recipes, were so popular that they eventually had a YouTube channel with 12 lakh subscribers.
On the channel run by her grandson, she is seen outdoors in a patch of farm, slicing vegetables and giving instructions for the preparation of a duck curry. The final dish is served to family members on a banana leaf, with Mastanamma doing the first taste test herself.
In an inspiring video about her life, Mastanamma talks about how she lost four of her five children, but continued to live to fight another day. She boasts about how, as a young woman, when two men tried to misbehave with her, she ‘threw one of them into the river and threatened to do the same with the other man too’.
She talks about how, though she cannot read and write, she still knows how to count money well and make a success of anything.
And she did, as is clear from the much loved cooking recipes.
Having worked once more as a labourer at the age of 105, Mastannama was a true celebrity of our times. Rest in peace.
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