Word: lakshmi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Pahwa estimates the total matrimonial website market in India at between $15 million and $20 million a year. He hopes to grab up to 5% of that, and is convinced that the market of divorced Indians will keep growing. Just ask Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi...
...seemed like a perfect union of literary acclaim and Bollywood glitz. He: a Booker Prize-winning author and one of India's most acclaimed literary exports. She: a gorgeous model-turned-actress turned cooking-show host. Little wonder then that this week's announcement that Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi are splitting after just three years of marriage is front page news across India, the country of their births if not their main residence...
...take it anymore," says Julie George, a Pune-based lawyer in matrimonial cases. "There is a lot more independence, freedom. Women who work are financially independent and aren't prepared to put up with a husband who harasses them." While no one is suggesting that Rushdie was harassing Lakshmi in any way (Indian papers reported that she was seen partying with "another man" recently), the couple is splitting, according to Rushdie's spokeswoman "because of her desire to end their marriage...
...that's only half the story. Lakshmi is hardly representative of the average Indian woman. And while middle class, urban women may be taking charge and sometimes just as likely to leave their husbands as their husbands are to leave them, in India's rural villages, it's still the men who initiate most divorces - often leaving women and children with no financial and little family support. "Poor women in villages are often just abandoned," says George, who works for Streevani, a Pune-based non-governmental organization that, according to its website, is "committed to the empowerment of women...
These days, however, the Marwaris have it all. Lakshmi Mittal, one of the world's richest men, was born in 1950 in a village 20 minutes drive north of Mandawa. And travel a similar distance to the east, to the village of Pilani, and you will find yourself in the hometown of the Birlas, one of India's most legendary business families. The Birlas and the Mittals, as well as countless other Marwari clans, share a common history. From the 19th century onwards, when the ancient Silk Road that crisscrossed Mandawa began to be eclipsed by the steamship...