Padma Lakshmi Biography, Pictures, Wallpapers & Videos

This blog post is about Padma Lakshmi Biography, Pictures, Wallpapers & Videos.

"Padma Parvati Lakshmi, Lady Rushdie" (born September 1, 1970) is an Indian American cookbook author, actress, and former model who has described herself as the first well-known model from India. She has been the host of the reality television program "Top Chef" since season two.

BIOGRAPHY

Early life

Padma was born in the state of Kerala, India, on September 1, 1970, though she grew up in Madras, Tamil Nadu. However, Padma spent most of her adolescent life in the United States.

Her parents' only child together, Lakshmi is the daughter of an executive with Pfizer and his first wife, Vijaya, a nurse who presently specializes in suicide prevention. Her parents separated when she was one and divorced a year later. Both parents later remarried; her mother's third and present husband is a plumber.

When she was 14 years old, she was involved in a serious automobile accident, causing an injury of her right arm, which required surgery leaving a 7 inch scar, between her elbow and shoulder. The accident happened on a Sunday afternoon on her way back with her parents from a Hindu temple in Malibu. She remembers a loud bang, looking out the windshield and realizing the family's red Mercury Sedan was airborne. Padma describes the event in the Vogue-April 2001 edition as 'Flying in a car felt like an exhilarating hallucination, an unbelievable ride that oddly remains one of the most beautiful images in my memory.' The car flew 40 feet down an embankment directly into a tree. The tree trunk fell directly on top of the car. She remained conscious, covered in glass, for the 40 minutes it took for the paramedics and firefighters to get through the traffic. They used the 'jaws of life' to extract the family from the crumpled car. A helicopter landed in the middle of the highway to air lift her parents away while an ambulance carried Padma to the hospital. Fortunately, everyone survived. Her injuries included a fractured right hip and a shattered upper right arm which resulted in her famous 7-inch scar.

By a later marriage of her father's, Lakshmi has a half-brother and a half-sister, who was an actress and classical dancer but is now pursuing a career with children with special-needs. As Lakshmi said in an interview published in "The Guardian", 'My father had quit his job as an executive at Pfizer to manage her career. That was kind of like rubbing salt in the wound. I didn't understand why he wanted that relationship with her, and not with me.'

Education

Lakshmi is a 1992 graduate of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, where she received a B.A. with honors in Theatre Arts..

Lakshmi was brought up as a vegetarian and has admitted that because of this, she sometimes becomes 'squeamish' when sampling other cultural delicacies.

Padma Lakshmi