Nandini Mukherjee of Bleecker Street believes in reincarnation. She also believes in reinvention.

And she believes there’s a connection between the two.

“I’m that connection,” Ms. Mukherjee said yesterday. “As an Indian-born Hindu, I believe that our soul is born and reborn many times over. As someone who studied in America and now works here, I believe that it’s possible to reinvent oneself during the course of a lifetime.”

The reincarnation part of her statement may be difficult to establish, but Ms. Mukherjee has certainly had several avatars in her 31 years. She founded and runs a successful small business, the Indian Bread Company, in Manhattan’s West Village. Earlier, she obtained a master’s degree in lighting at the Parsons School of Design, and then worked at the prestigious architectural lighting firm of Fisher Marantz Stone, which, among other things, lit up ground zero’s twin beams.

And still earlier, Ms. Mukherjee was an architect who gave up a promising practice in New Delhi to return home to the steel-manufacturing town of Jamshedpur in the eastern part of India. There she designed and built a futuristic house to accommodate a sprawling joint family – her father, Pronab, a businessman, her mother, Suchitra, and her father’s two brothers and their children.

“My father had always encouraged individuality when I was growing up as an only child, so I was able to have my way in building that house,” Ms. Mukherjee said.

The individualistic tendencies instilled in her resulted in a pivotal decision a couple of years ago. She and a friend, Rupila Sethi, were ruing the shortage of restaurants in New York that offered truly indigenous foods from India’s 28 states and seven federal territories. Ms. Mukherjee quit her job at the lighting company to start an eatery that focused on bread.

Why bread?

“There are endless cuisines in India,” she said. “But there’s one staple common to all those cuisines – bread. The idea was to give Indian bread the center stage – an Indian twist on the bread cafe culture.”

But the entrepreneurs immediately encountered a problem: Neither of them knew how to start an eatery.

Not one to let such a trifling issue hold up her dreams, Ms. Mukherjee took courses at the Institute of Culinary Education, and attended seminars at the French Culinary Institute, both in Manhattan. Giving her imagination free rein, she began concocting bread-based dishes with exotic names such as Naanini, a sandwich with spicy dry curries, or kebabs of grilled lamb and chicken between slices of traditional Indian flat bread.

Coaxing some financial assistance from her husband, Chetan Gandhi, who works for Intel, Ms. Mukherjee opened a bakery-cum cafe on Bleecker Street.

In doing so, she joined the ranks of 500,000 small businesses that account for 50% of all businesses in New York City and collectively employ 1.5 million people, according to the city’s Department of Small Business Services.

Her business, the Indian Bread Company, was a quick success. It began getting standing take-out orders. While the facility can accommodate only 21 tables, more than 200 people course through it every day – tourists, students from nearby New York University, and, of course, South Asians yearning for freshly prepared traditional bread.

That traffic increased exponentially during last year’s Republican Convention, where Ms. Mukherjee’s foods were showcased. And a few weeks ago, the North Indian Bengali Association – representing the ethnic community to which Ms. Mukherjee belongs – hired her to cater for 10,000 people who’d assembled at Madison Square Garden.

How did she manage to fulfill that daunting order?

“My mother happened to be visiting me from India,” Ms. Mukherjee said. “So I cajoled her into my kitchen, and we cooked and cooked and cooked. I know how fussy Bengalis can be about their food. So just imagine 10,000 Bengalis judging my dishes. I survived.”

So who knows? Today New York, tomorrow India.