Some of us need help in the kitchen — and make sure we get it. Some of us want additional inputs when it comes to deciding what the menu of the day should be — and we sit back while a third party thumbs through our recipe books and goes out and acquires the ingredients for the dishes they decide we should prepare.

And then, there are some of us who have no problem at all if someone else just takes over the kitchen completely and frees us from all that shopping and chopping and stirring and frying — and allows us to laze and live in a daze of happy anticipation of the next meal.

Whichever of these categories (or any other) you fall into where cooking is concerned, you could soon have a “smart” kitchen that will do a lot of the spade work for you — or at least, that is what reports say is in the offing.

Your “smart” kitchen will one day be able to order the ingredients you require, make payments for these, and have everything ready for you when you are ready to get to work at the stove. Your kitchen could also be made extra smart so that it can tell you what you should be eating, going by your preferences, your weight, your heart rate and what is lying in your fridge or deep freeze.

There would probably have to be other inputs provided as well to make all this happen, but I haven’t yet got to the end of the article. What I have read so far has made me a bit cross-eyed and my head is still spinning with the mental picture of a kitchen smart enough to actually figure out my weight, decipher the codes and abbreviations in my recipe books and also sort out the surprises that lurk on my freezer shelves!

But there’s more, apparently, and I get to it slowly and somewhat reluctantly. Your “smart” kitchen will also have “smart” pans that are programmed to tell you when to turn up the heat or turn it down. I imagine my dishes and utensils shrieking at me a la something out of Merlin’s cave or Mrs Weasley’s kitchen and I jump back and throw the article down like it has suddenly turned into a cobra and bared its fangs at me!

It sounds too much like someone leaning over my shoulder disapprovingly and giving me directions I am intrinsically incapable of following, because, you see, I don’t think I have ever aimed at perfection in the kitchen and cannot recall a time when any dish I cooked turned out like it was supposed to.

An easy-going approach and a casual, “So what if the onions have over-browned, OK, almost burned, and the vegetables have lost their crispness and their colour?” has seen me through three decades and more of feeding my family — and I don’t see anyone around me looking starved!

Besides, do I want my Chicken 65 to be perfect and recognisable each time? The way I do it right now, with a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a last minute gasp, “Oh no! I forgot to add yoghurt!” gives me the freedom to make Chicken 65 three times in a row without repeating the taste and without anyone being any the wiser.

My suggestion, therefore, is that while working on “smart” kitchens, “smart” pans and other “smart” devices to make gourmet cooking possible for those who don’t have the time or don’t like to spend time in the kitchen, why not also come up with an all-purpose pill that can produce different tastes for different palates — and let indifferent cooks like me shut down our kitchens?

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.