Nankhatai

On heritage and AI

Jun 21, 2026

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Friends,

The plate has to go back. It arrives covered in clingfilm, carrying biscuits somebody made in a kitchen that is not ours, and at some point the plate has to return there. Sometimes it is not a plate but a reused tub that a Chinese takeaway came in, or Tupperware that has been moving between families for longer than my kids have been alive or one of those freezer bags. They come from a friend of my mother’s, that family friend everyone agrees makes the best ones. They come via my mother, and eventually to us. She brings them round usually as a supplement to something else, usually with a few clippings she has cut out for me, an article, a notice, something she thinks I should read. The biscuits and the clippings are the same thing, really, a thread she keeps tied between her house and mine, and the plate going back is how she keeps tying it.

Inside that plate are “nankhatai” [pr. “Naan” “Cut” “Eye”], small shortbread biscuits I have eaten my whole life, pale gold, cracked across the top like dry earth, and ours have a thin swirl of chocolate through them that is not traditional and is the only kind I will now accept. You lift the clingfilm and the smell comes up first, cardamom and warm butter.

Everyone in my family knows what nankhatai is. We have never once had to talk about it. It’s never the main event, yet it always seems to have been part of our lives.

These ones come for my youngest daughter. She likes them. But the truth is I am usually the one who finishes them, standing at the kitchen counter when nobody is looking, because she likes a hundred things and I have come to like fewer, and these are one of the few that are still mine. The plate is meant for her. I am the one who is hungry for it.

Have you ever eaten a biscuit straight out of the oven, before it has had the sense to cool? It is a little like that, except this one arrives with a few hundred years behind it, and it has been changing the whole way, and no two of them are ever quite the same, not within a single batch, where one comes out darker and one bigger and one cracked where the others held, and not from one country to the next, where the same biscuit took on more cardamom here and more sugar there. They are imperfect, every one of them, and that is the exact thing that makes them perfect, and it is the one trick a machine, which can only ever hand you the same thing twice, will never learn.

I tried to picture someone making them, and I couldn’t. I have eaten nankhatai my whole life and I do not hold a single memory of watching one be made. There is no scene. The people who make them just make them, alone in their own kitchens, the way you do a thing you have done ten thousand times, and then they share them, because they know everyone will be glad of them, and what reaches you is only ever the result on a plate. You never see the hands. Maybe that is the whole problem, sitting there in plain sight the entire time. You cannot inherit a thing nobody ever showed you how to do.

When we were small they were simply there, in the Tupperware when we came back from school, in tins lined with kitchen roll, a snack you could have whenever, gone the way fresh biscuits go, eaten standing up with a glass of milk, the crumbs caught in a cupped hand in under a minute. They were made by women I half remember and women I never met, and they were always good, every time. I did not think of them as heritage, I thought of them as furniture. The only thing I knew was that this one was ours, and the rest were just food.

Each of these women is known for a speciality, one dish, theirs, the one you go to them for. My mother is known for her chicken pastries, though she makes plenty of other food that keeps our family well fed. Someone else is famous for samosas. My mother-in-law is known for her stuffed parathas, and there is no point the rest of us trying to make them, because they will not be hers. They can all cook plenty, but each of that generation has a single thing that is the taste of them, so that when they are gone the dish is part of what people will mean when they say their names.

You will have your own version of this, even if it looks nothing like mine, your own nankhatai, your own piece of heritage inside your own family and your own culture, the kind of thing you would struggle to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it. It might be the challah on a Friday, the pan dulce on a Sunday morning, the mooncake once a year, or the thing somebody always brings back from a trip because to come home with nothing would be unthinkable. It is rarely grand. That is the point of it. It is just there, in the background of a life, until it is not.

Then there is my generation. We can all cook, a bit of everything, this cuisine and that one, taken from Google, magazine cuttings, websites - everywhere and tied to nowhere in particular. None of us is the one for anything. When it comes to the kind of thing my mother has, the single dish that will carry her name after her, I have nothing to give.

Not all of it is as dire as this sounds. Maybe you know someone who still makes chai the old way, every day, by hand, the recipe drifting a little in every kitchen it passes through while the act stays exactly the same - or the perfect chicken and mushroom pie with exactly the right amount of cream. The things you do every day seem to outlast the things you are handed on a plate. You could, if you wanted, blend leaves from a dozen countries into a tea nobody has ever drunk, tuned to your exact taste, and the machine would help you do it in minutes. The act of heritage, in a world like that, is to choose not to, to make the one chai the inherited way when you could have made anything. I do see nankhatai for sale sometimes, in our neighbourhood Indian shop, and I always look, and they are never the ones. They are nankhatai the way a photograph is a person, close, but not the thing itself. None of it was ever hard for me to get. We live minutes from the people who can make the real ones, and we never had to want them. Maybe you only really keep the things you were once afraid of losing, and we were never afraid of losing this?

What I can actually do is smaller and a little grim. I once set out to learn my mother’s pilau rice. I watched, I asked, I scribbled the method on page 47 of my wife’s cookbook, and for a while I could make it. I have not made it in years. We still eat my mum’s. The method is the part you can write down, and the part you can write down is the least important. The rest has a word people use, andaaz, by feel, by eye, the knowing that only lives in the hands and only passes by being in the room. I have the paper. I was in the room once. I was never inside the making.

What I can do on my own is a different kind of thing. I can photograph the inside of my fridge, send it to a chatbot, be told what to cook, and make a decent meal out of whatever was in there. I can make a good creme caramel now, after a lot of bad ones, because I found the right video and watched it enough times. These are real skills and they are mine. I earned the creme caramel. But they came from a screen and not from a person, and they are from nowhere. They are not my mother’s, and they will not be my kids’, because there is nothing inside them to hand down. So is that my heritage now? Has it simply morphed, the way the biscuit morphed, the way the chocolate swirl arrived, into a screen and a saved video and a thing nobody taught me? Or is it a skill wearing the clothes of a heritage, with nothing underneath it at all? I do not know, and I notice that I want it to be the first one.

What is happening on my table is happening to the whole of culture at once, faster, and harder to feel. People have started to measure what AI does to it, and the word they reach for is flattening. Ask it for anything often enough and it drifts to the average, the most probable version, the taste of a small slice of the world standing in for all of it. Ask it what to bake and it will not say nankhatai. It would say brownies, chocolate chip cookies, the popular and the safe. Almost everything we inherited is exactly this particular, too unlikely to be recommended, too specific to survive a machine doing the choosing.

In a world drifting toward that middle, the only thing that marks you as a specific person from a specific place is the part that did not come from a machine, the biscuit from one woman, the chai made one stubborn way. Maybe that is what heritage is for now, less a way of belonging than a way of proving you are not the average, not the person a machine would have written if nobody had ever made you by hand. Should being human come down to whatever you refused to let the machine smooth away? It is a bleak reason to hold on to a biscuit. It might also be the only one left.

So I will say the thing that has been circling in my head, because I think too much about these things. Maybe the heritage of nankhatai stops with me. Not because anyone forbade it, or it was lost, or the people who make them will not always be here, though they will not. It stops with me because I ate the plate clean my whole life and never once asked to be shown. There will be no ceremony when it ends, no last batch, no one saying this is the final time. It will just stop appearing on the table, and my daughter, who likes them well enough but could take them or leave them, will not notice the day it went, because you cannot mourn a thing nobody told you to hold. The thread does not snap. It simply stops being tied to anything.

Maybe, years from now, she will be old and half-remember a word, nankhatai, a thing the family used to have, and ask the machine to make it. And it will, in a second, for someone who never had the first one. We are learning to pull dead things back into the present, the way they talk about the woolly mammoth. But it comes back to no herd, no tundra, no mother, only a specimen with the world that made it gone. A nankhatai with no grandmother behind it is the same animal. The recipe can be brought back to life. The throughline of heritage cannot.

Or maybe I have it wrong, and nothing dies, it only morphs, and the creme caramel I taught myself is the new nankhatai, mine in a way my mother’s was never quite mine, and my daughter will have her own screen and her own saved thing and call it heritage and not be wrong. I cannot tell whether I am watching a thing end or a thing change. Everything ends eventually, and one day I will be as gone as the recipe, and the world will not pause for either of us.

This is how things end now, not banned or forgotten, but simply never learned because a screen can show you the steps and a machine can make something close enough.

But there is one move still left to me while I am here, and it is small, and I am finally going to make it. The next time the plate comes, I am not going to finish them in secret, standing up, doing something else. I am going to sit down with my daughter, the one they were meant for, and eat one slowly with her, the slow bite, the hint of chocolate, the cold glass of milk. I cannot teach her to make them, because nobody ever showed me. But I can let her watch her father go still over his love for a biscuit, and that caring, not the recipe, is the one thing I am still able to hand down, so that years from now, when she half-remembers the word, there is a feeling underneath it, and the machine is holding something it can never bake.

Does heritage matter in the age of AI? I am no longer sure that is even the right question. I went looking in a biscuit and found a plate that has to go back, a making I was never shown, and a small girl who might, if I get this one thing right, remember the look on my face.

SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI is out on 3 July 2026. It is a book about the human things that cannot be outsourced, copied, or handed back by a machine.

Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,

Rahim

Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (Kogan Page, July 2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
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