Jaya Ahsan Cooks Chicken for Her Pet Puppies on a Village Clay Stove in Winter

Actor Jaya Ahsan, popular in both Bangladesh and West Bengal, was seen cooking chicken for her pet puppies on a clay stove in a village setting in a video posted on the morning of Tuesday 6 January 2026, Jagonews24 reported that day. Wrapped in thick winter clothes on a bitterly cold morning, she told viewers plainly that she is not much of a cook. The report did not name the village. The video spread on social media and drew a strong response, with many people praising her.

According to Jagonews24, Jaya said in the video that she was cooking chicken on a clay stove in a rural setting on a winter morning. The meal was not for her. It was food for her pet puppies, and she said she was cooking the chicken with light spices. The report gave no other ingredient, no quantity and no method, so there is no recipe to pass on, only the picture of an actor at a village stove with a pot of chicken for her dogs.

She was frank about her limits in the kitchen. "I actually can't cook. But I have to cook for these babies (the dogs) myself," she was heard saying. Then she added, jokingly: "Don't go expecting that I can cook a lot. I can't really cook."

She also said she was thoroughly enjoying winter in the village. That day, she said, a range of tasty dishes would be cooked on the clay stove over firewood, and beef would be among them. Jaya herself does not eat beef, the report said, for reasons of health awareness; she only likes to have the gravy of the meat curry.

The combination of village winter, clay stove and affection for animals is what made the clip travel, Jagonews24 wrote. People on social media praised what the report called the humane and village-rooted side of her.

The video appeared in the middle of a sharp cold spell. On the morning of 6 January the Bangladesh Meteorological Department recorded a minimum of 7 degrees Celsius in Rajshahi, the lowest of the season there, The Daily Star's Bangla edition reported. A meteorologist told the paper that a cold wave was sweeping ten districts: Rajshahi, Pabna, Bogura, Dinajpur, Nilphamari, Panchagarh, Rangamati, Jashore, Kushtia and Chuadanga. He expected conditions to stay much the same until 11 January, with temperatures starting to rise from 12 January.

Such a spell had been forecast. The department's long-range outlook for January, reported by Prothom Alo on 3 January, spoke of four to five cold waves in the month: two or three mild to moderate, and one or two moderate to severe. It warned of light to moderate fog, especially in river basins, sometimes lasting until noon, which can narrow the gap between day and night temperatures and sharpen the cold. The same outlook found December 2025 almost dry, with rainfall 99.3 percent below normal, and gave the month's lowest temperature as 7.5 degrees in Gopalganj on 31 December.

The department grades a cold wave by the minimum temperature in an area:

• Mild: 8.1 to 10 degrees Celsius
• Moderate: 6.1 to 8 degrees Celsius
• Severe: 4.1 to 6 degrees Celsius
• Very severe: below 4 degrees Celsius

A Prothom Alo explainer of December 2024 described how this cold reaches the country. Winter in Bangladesh generally runs from early December to the first week of February, when cold air from the Himalayan foothills moves across northern India and enters from the north-west. The explainer said the temperature must stay below 10 degrees for at least three days to count as a cold wave, that one wave can last from three days up to 10 or 15, and that fog alone is not a sign of one.

Jaya Ahsan works in both Bangladeshi and Indian Bengali cinema. She first appeared on television in a 1997 advertisement and acted in television drama before her first film appearance in Bachelor in 2004. Her first lead film role came in Guerrilla in 2011. Her Indian Bengali debut was Aborto in 2013, and her Hindi debut was Kadak Singh in 2023.

She has won the National Film Award for Best Actress five times, for Guerrilla, Chorabali, Zero Degree, Debi and Beauty Circus, and the Filmfare Awards Bangla for Best Actress in 2018 for Bishorjan. She also produces films through her company, C Te Cinema, whose first production was Debi in 2018. Dhaka Post noted in 2024 that she has also earned praise for web series.

Her line about not being able to cook is more modest than an earlier account of her kitchen. In May 2025 Prothom Alo's lifestyle supplement Naksha put her on its cover with her co-star Mohsina Akter to mark the film Jaya Aar Sharmin. The film is set in the pandemic lockdown. Jaya plays an actor named Jaya, and Mohsina plays Sharmin, a domestic worker stranded in her home, and much of the story takes place around cooking.

Prothom Alo reported then that Jaya is especially fond of Bengali cooking. She rarely has time to enter the kitchen regularly because of work, the paper said, but cooks such dishes when she gets the chance. She was said to mix panta, the soaked rice, very well, to love cooking dried fish dishes, especially chapa, and to cook fish well. For the photo shoot she supplied a recipe for saffron and rosemary chicken. She also told the paper that she most loves her mother's cooking, and described how her mother picks greens from her kitchen garden and adds them to a dish, which changes its familiar taste.

Growing food has also shown up on her social media before. In July 2024 she shared a picture of herself on her balcony, in an olive green sari, holding a tray of sweet potatoes, Dhaka Post reported. Her caption called digging sweet potatoes out of the soil an adventure and said they had been grown on her small balcony. Vegetable plants and flowers could be seen around her in the picture.

The puppies in the January video fit a pattern that reports have followed for years. Priyo.com wrote in February 2019 that she was known as an animal lover alongside her film work. It recalled that she had made headlines in 2018 by visiting a shelter for injured dogs and cats in Khilgaon, Dhaka, and reported that on 2 February 2019 she posted cheerful pictures and videos of herself and her sister with two pet dogs on a field near the airport.

In August 2020, when Dhaka South City Corporation planned to move 30,000 dogs out of the capital and animal rights activists voiced concern, she joined them, Desh Rupantor reported. She promoted a wall-painting event by People for Animal Welfare (PAW) Foundation on Satmasjid Road, where artists were to paint street dogs on 28 and 29 August, and said she would go there herself on 29 August. She called for a space of compassion for animals. The paper added that she had stood by the city's street dogs at various times and had gone to different parts of the capital to feed them during the coronavirus period.

In January 2025 she posted a video introducing Jimmy as the youngest member of her household, Aaj Tak Bangla reported. Both were wrapped in warm clothes and on their way to a doctor because, her caption said, both of them had caught a cold. The report said Jimmy is a local dog she had taken in shortly before, and that many followers praised her for adopting one.

Home cooking for dogs is a subject on which veterinary references have a clear view. The report on Jaya's video did not list the spices she used or say what else her puppies eat, so what follows is general guidance, not a comment on her pot. A veterinary surgeon is the right person to ask about any particular puppy.

The Merck Veterinary Manual, in a section last updated in September 2024, says growing puppies need more than adult dogs. It puts a healthy puppy's maintenance energy need at about three times its resting requirement up to four months of age and twice that afterwards, and says calcium and phosphorus needs also rise during growth. It warns that unbalanced homemade diets are among the most common causes of nutritional problems, that diets made mostly of meat can cause calcium deficiency, and that rickets is most often seen in puppies fed homemade diets without supplementation. Its advice is that a homemade diet should be formulated by a board-certified veterinary nutritionist.

A study in Scientific Reports in 2019 analysed recipes of home-prepared diets for adult dogs (75) and cats (25) and found that none supplied the recommended levels of all the nutrients evaluated. Cooking itself, on the other hand, has a safety value. The US Food and Drug Administration, in a 2018 consumer note on raw pet food, said thorough cooking to a proper internal temperature kills Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes.

The ASPCA's Animal Poison Control list of people foods to avoid is a common reference on seasoning. It says onions, garlic and chives can cause gastrointestinal irritation and red blood cell damage, with dogs at risk depending on the amount eaten, and that too much salt can bring on thirst, vomiting, diarrhoea, tremors and seizures. It also warns that raw meat can carry Salmonella and E. coli and that raw bones can cause injury or obstruction in the gut.

The stove in the video is a familiar object across rural Bangladesh. Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia, says almost all rural households cook on an open chula, usually fed with dry leaves, fuelwood, agricultural residue, rice husk and cow dung, while better-off households may use kerosene or LP gas stoves or electric heaters. It describes fuelwood as the main cooking fuel for most urban and rural households, at about 40 million tons a year, and warns that this is rapidly depleting forest reserves and threatens the ecological balance.

Research in the field gives a sense of the scale. A study in Scientific Reports in 2024 of 909 women in Matlab, a rural area of Bangladesh, found that 721 of them, or 79.3 percent, depended on biomass fuel.

The clay stove is not only a village object. When LPG prices jumped in early 2023, with the regulator setting a 12 kg cylinder at Tk 1,498 from 3 February, Prothom Alo reported from Jhalakathi that people were turning to firewood for cooking and that some flat dwellers were installing clay stoves beside their gas burners. One small trader told the paper he had set up a clay stove in his kitchen and was stocking firewood. Split firewood was selling there at Tk 350 to 370 a maund, up from Tk 280 a month before, and environmentalists feared the effect of the demand for trees.

The warmth of a wood fire has a cost, and it falls mainly on the people who cook every day. The World Health Organization, in a fact sheet dated 16 December 2025, says about 2.1 billion people, roughly a quarter of the world's population, cook with open fires or inefficient stoves burning solid fuels or kerosene. It estimates that household air pollution caused about 2.9 million deaths in 2021, including more than 309,000 children under five, and links exposure to stroke, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer and pneumonia. Women and children carry the greatest burden, WHO says, because they usually do the cooking and the gathering of fuel and spend the most time near the smoke.

Bangladeshi research points the same way. In a randomised trial published in The Lancet Regional Health Southeast Asia in January 2024, icddr,b gave 628 pregnant women in Shahjadpur a low-cost kitchen with an improved cookstove, while 639 kept their traditional stoves. The intervention reduced the risk of low birthweight by 37 percent, and carbon monoxide levels in the mothers' blood fell in that group but not in the other.

An improved stove usually has a chimney or pipe that carries smoke out of the kitchen, a Prothom Alo column explained in January 2024, putting the cost of building one at Tk 1,000 to 1,200. Infrastructure Development Company Limited (IDCOL) launched a programme for such stoves in May 2013 with World Bank and government funding. It set a target of 1 million stoves by December 2018 and reached it in January 2017. By December 2020 it counted 2.46 million stoves and had set a new target of 5 million by June 2023. IDCOL says its work raised stoves from at least 15 percent thermal efficiency to at least 35 percent.

Jaya's talk of enjoying a village winter belongs to a season closely tied to food. Banglapedia says the pitha season begins in late autumn, when farmers harvest paddy, and it calls the pithas of the winter season the most delicious. These traditional home-made cakes use rice or wheat flour, molasses or sugar, coconut and oil. They differ from area to area, and the Shishu Academy exhibited 106 categories in 1991. Date juice and the molasses made from it, available in winter, are key ingredients.

That same date palm sap carries a serious warning. Raw sap must not be drunk, because fruit bats can contaminate it with the Nipah virus. WHO reported in February 2023 that Bangladesh's outbreaks usually run from December to May, matching the sap harvest, and that most cases were linked to drinking raw sap. It advises boiling freshly collected sap before drinking it. Bangladesh's Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research (IEDCR) said in January 2025 that the country had identified 343 cases since 2001, of whom 71 percent had died, and the chief scientific officer of the national Nipah surveillance at icddr,b told Prothom Alo that neither nets nor tin keep bats away from sap.

Photo: Rocky Masum / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). The top picture shows clay cooking stoves in Bangladesh, as background; it is not from the video.

Sources: Jagonews24, The Daily Star Bangla, Prothom Alo, Dhaka Post, Desh Rupantor, Priyo.com, Aaj Tak Bangla, Merck Veterinary Manual, Scientific Reports, US Food and Drug Administration, ASPCA, Banglapedia, World Health Organization, The Lancet Regional Health Southeast Asia, IDCOL, Wikipedia