Supermodel, celebrity food show host and cookbook writer Padma Lakshmi set the tone for the many by being amazingly honest about her life. Be it her success, her secret of dropping from Size 12 to Size 4 within 10 months of becoming a mother or her much-talked-about relationship with writer Salman Rushdie, she was as candid as one could get.
Replying to a probing question by session moderator Koel Purie Rinchet — the host of On The Couch With Koel — on the way the world viewed her relationship with Rushdie, Padma Lakshmi said: “I don’t regret a day of the over eight years I have spent with Salman. It was a very intense, deep, special and monumental part of my life.”
On the speculation that was rife at the time on her relationship with a much older but successful man, the host of America’s top-rated culinary show, the Emmy Award-winning Top Chef, said: “I was attracted to the accomplishment, I was attracted to be inspired, I was attracted to be inspiring. We loved each other. It was a big deal for both of us. There was nothing superficial about it.
Lakshmi looked simple yet fetching in a white dress, flaunting a bangle from her own jewellery line and the famous scar on her right arm that she received after a car crash when she was 14.
She explained how she had dropped eight clothes sizes in 10 months — without the luxury of sweating it out in a gym. She was also chatty about juggling motherhood and a high-profile job that required her to “sit on my butt, eat for a living and talk on TV”.
At the crack of dawn every day, Lakshmi runs up and down 70 flights of fire exit stairs at the back of her New York apartment. But she appeared on TV in her Size 12 self because she had to get back to work within six weeks of her daughter Krishna’s (now 10 months old) birth. That’s when she realised they just don’t make good clothes for big women.
Life’s not easy when you’re a single mum, a celebrity television show host, a writer of cookbooks and an entrepreneur whose spices and teas business made $2 million (Rs9.2 crore) in its first year. To be able to balance the many demands on her time, Lakshmi said she was learning how to “rearrange my professional life to accommodate the changes”.
She has cut down her social appearances, for starters. But life now has other compensations to offer. “No spreadsheet that tells me I have made so much money is more important than the laughter of Krishna,” Lakshmi said. “I am happy when I look into Krishna’s face. Success is a lot about how you define it.”
Throughout her talk, Lakshmi talked about life’s ability to throw up surprises. She had spent New Year’s Eve at “a very, very swanky resort” in a secluded Caribbean island where Prince decided to do an impromptu concert and then she was in her grandmother’s home at Besant Nagar, Chennai, sleeping in the same bed where she had slept when she was seven and taking “balti baths”.
“Have the imagination to be open to take what life gives you,” said the woman who has seen it all — from her disastrous foray into Bollywood with Boom (“the magnum opus”, as she sarcastically calls it now) to the relentless media scrutiny of her failed marriage with Rushdie, to achieving international celebrity status.
She also talked about the way she has transformed her lonely struggle against endometriosis, the leading cause of infertility among women (she had to have four surgeries to overcome the condition), into a campaign for early detection of the treatable disease.
Lakshmi said she did not want her talk to be “a collection of platitudes or cliché press releases”. She kept her word — and kept the audience, comprising mainly women professionals, hooked on to everything she said.
It is the third day of the most romantic week of the year where love birds exchange chocolates after giving the roses on the first day and proposing on the second. Every day in the valentine week has its own charm and plays its role to set the ball rolling for the D-Day i.e. Valentine Day. this is the day of the year when you can snuggle with your loved one and sip dark chocolate with a hint of cinnamon and enjoy sweet chocolate to sizzle the moment.
