Multiple roles of model, actor, food expert, author and a mother dot the careerline of Padma Lakshmi who, unfortunately, became a media fetish only owing to her marriage to a celebrity author.
Few knew that beyond all these roles lay a quintessential South Indian who slurped at the fragrance of mustard seeds and curry leaves, and a tough woman who has weathered it rough since her childhood. In a free-wheeling chat with fashion designer Shilpa Reddy at an event here on Monday, Ms. Padma Lakshmi opened her heart to reveal a little of what inspired her latest book Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir .
Though initially intended to be a guide to healthy eating, the book ended up being autobiographical due to continuous harking back to associated memories. For instance, she had modelled her kitchen after her granny’s at Chennai, because the flavours of Mustard and ‘Kadi Patta’ are hard to find where she stayed in the USA. Though moving to US along with her mother, Padma Lakshmi has distinct memories of visiting her grandparents’ house at Chennai every year, after journeying solo for over 20 hours.
“I am a super taster since childhood,” she says. She would climb up the shelves in search of pickles, forcing her grandmother finally to lock the kitchen.
Modelling did help with her future career as food critic. Wherever she went on modelling assignments, she made sure that she tasted the street food there, while other colleagues went shopping. Her first advice to young persons would be to travel and explore the world as much as possible. Fear is what one needs to conquer. “You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to what happens to you,” she says.
The book also mentions the darker side of her life, the child sexual abuse she faced, and her Endometriosis which remained untreated till her 30s, as she had been made to believe that being woman was wrought with pain.
Racism was felt at US, but it did not bother her as much as the colour prejudice back in India. “I want Fair & Lovely to go out of business,” she says to peals of laughter from the audience mostly comprising women from FICCI Ladies Organisation, one among the organisers of the event, apart from US Consulate, Harper Collins and Taj Krishna. Writing this book is the most gratifying thing in life for her, after her motherhood.
“So long, I had no control on what was being said about me in media,” she says, indicating that it will not be so any more after the book.
