Padma Lakshmi

And so I was left with a mantra, a sort of haiku version of our relationship: I don’t regret one day I spent with him, nor did I leave a moment too soon.

— Padma Lakshmi

At first, I was grateful to be the object of such intense desire. Yet what’s flattering in the first year can be suffocating in the eighth.

— Padma Lakshmi

At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.

— Padma Lakshmi

But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorcees with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized from everyday life because of an invisible scarlet D hovering over them. Meanwhile, Second Wave feminism in the United States was changing attitudes about how women were treated in the workplace and in society, and how unmarried women were perceived in particular. Women were challenging age-old notions of their place in the world. Western media was full of unafraid, smart American women who published magazines, were marching in DC, and were generally making a lot of noise. No such phenomenon had reached our Indian shores. I’m sure my mother had read about the ERA movement, Roe v. Wade, and bra burnings. She, too, wanted the freedom to earn a living in a country where she wouldn’t be a pariah because of her marital status. We could have a fighting chance at surviving independently in the United States, versus being dependent on her father or a future husband in India. Conservative as he was, my grandfather K. C. Krishnamurti, or “Cha-cha,” as I called him in Tamil, had encouraged her to leave my father after he witnessed how she had been treated. He respected women and loved his daughter, and it must have broken his heart to see the situation she had married into. He, too, wanted us to have a second chance at happiness. America, devoid of an obvious caste system and outright misogyny, seemed to value hard work and the use of one’s mind; even a woman could succeed there. My grandfather was a closet feminist.

— Padma Lakshmi

Everything I had been carting from one stage of my life to another, to remind me of me, was in the boxes that surrounded me. And there were so many of them now, just days before my thirty-seventh birthday. But so little left of me. At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.

— Padma Lakshmi

Food has played a central role not only in my professional but also in my emotional life, in all of my dealings with loved ones and most of all in my relationship to myself and my body. I am what feeds me. And how I feed myself at any given moment says a lot about what I’m going through or what I need. I don’t believe I am alone. Yes, we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts. Like most people and many women, I think about what to eat all the time. I am constantly plotting my next meal, planning how and what I will shop for, and ever hatching new plans to avoid the foods I know will undermine my well-being. Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.

— Padma Lakshmi

Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.

— Padma Lakshmi

From the simple stringing together of lemon garlands for the goddess Drug, to dividing the Prasad or blessed foods for the children first, I came to associate food not only with feminist, but also with purity and divinity.

— Padma Lakshmi

I know most people use their phones to tell time, but there's something very romantic and beautiful about a timepiece.

— Padma Lakshmi

In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn't fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It's like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience.

— Padma Lakshmi