Padma Lakshmi- BIO

Padma Lakshmi,was born in 1970 in India to middle-class hindhu family.Her mother was a nurse and her father worked for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals.

Lakshmi said, “My parents separated when I was one, the divorce became final when I was two, and my father did not pursue a relationship with me. I approached him in 1998, and it was very odd for me because he remarried and has two other children. My half-sister, who's 25 now, was a classical dancer and a Bollywood actress."

Lakshmi was brought up between her grandparents' home in Madras and her mother's in New York. Padma's mother has had no more children but she has been married three times, so there were stepfathers in Padma's life but she is dismissive of the importance they played.

“There was this guy she was married to from when I was four until I was nine,” is all she has to say about her mother's second husband, perhaps because she was living and going to school in Madras until she was ten. “This husband she's been with for a long time. He's alright. He's a plumber, and my mother and he really get along, but we had a hard time when I was growing up because he's so conservative. He's of Indian descent but he's lived in America for many years and sometimes people like that think that they are clinging to their culture but the culture they are clinging to is 30 years out of date.” She maintains that he had little to worry about; she wasn't a minxy, provocative adolescent. “I just wanted to be a normal American teenager. I was tall and lanky and I didn't have any flesh on me; I was like a flagpole. I was a good student. I was involved in theatre and track and student government. I didn't lose my virginity until college.

I wasn't doing drugs.” She didn't have much chance. Even though she was educated in America, the moment the school term ended her mother would stick her on a plane back to the grandparents. “I think my mother didn't want me to forget that part of me,” she says, and certainly no resentment is evident. "I think she wanted me to have a sense of family.