What’s the best way to acquire skills? Learning on the job? Or attending a formal course? I guess it depends on the nature of the skills. If you want to be a doctor or an engineer, then there is no real alternative to a formal education in the subject. Also read | The Taste by Vir Sanghvi: Best meals I ate outside India

But there are many fields where it is not so clear-cut. Take fine art, for example. MF Hussain went briefly to art school but dropped out. And it made no difference to his career. Same with Pablo Picasso, who dropped out of art school in his native Spain, saying that it was a waste of time.

Or journalism. Bob Woodward, who may be America’s most famous journalist, never studied journalism. Neither did our own Rajdeep Sardesai nor Arnab Goswami, who are both extremely well educated, but never bothered with a professional qualification. (Since you ask: it never even occurred to me to get a journalism degree.)

What about food? Well, many of the world’s greatest chefs never went to culinary school. In France, Paul Bocuse had no academic qualifications. In Britain, the most famous chefs have not attended culinary school: Heston Blumenthal, Jamie Oliver, Marco Pierre White, or Gordon Ramsay. (Though Ramsay did study hotel management.) The greatest American chef of our time, Thomas Keller, never attended catering college. The great Swiss chef Daniel Humm has no professional cooking degree.

So, how do chefs learn?

To be fair, in both journalism and cuisine, the quality of teaching has improved massively in recent years, so perhaps the next generation of great chefs and journos will have professional degrees.

Frankly, though, I remain skeptical that many of the most important aspects of cooking or journalism can be taught. There are exceptions in certain areas: TV journalists need technical skills in editing, camera work, etc., so a degree can help. (Barkha Dutt........

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