Mar 14, 2022

Deepika Padukone Graces Cover of Allure's Global Beauty Issue

Introducing The Cover Star of Allure's Global Beauty Issue - Deepika Padukone

Before Padukone ascended to her Bollywood throne, she ruled over another court: badminton. What began for her as an after-school hobby quickly turned into competition at the national level. Padukone’s skills run in the family: Her father, Prakash, was a professional player, ranked number one in the world in 1980. (Six years later, Padukone was born in Copenhagen, where her father and her mother, Ujjala, had moved in pursuit of the game.)

Somewhere between competitions, she started modeling at the behest of a friend’s mother, who ran an agency. When Padukone finally took a break from badminton at age 16 — if you can call pausing to take your board exams (the equivalent of the SATs) a break — she had the realization that she preferred modeling to athletics.

“I think that focusing on the importance of mental health is what my calling is. It’s work that I will continue to do. And hopefully the foundation will survive even beyond me.”

— Deepika Padukone

She established the LiveLoveLaugh Foundation to keep the conversation going and to provide resources for those who are suffering. Since the ratio of psychiatrists to the general population in India is just 0.75 (so, not even one whole psychiatrist) to every 100,000 people, one of the foundation’s most important undertakings was creating a certification program to help general physicians learn to identify, manage, and treat common mental health disorders.

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