New Delhi: In a country where pot-bellies and bulging midriffs are not exactly uncommon, Indians, it appears are suddenly ‘outraged' that arguably the country's most beautiful woman Aishwarya Rai Bachchan has put on post-pregnancy weight. Aishwarya, 38, with her cold, sculpted fair-skinned and porcelain-like features has held the country in awe ever since she featured in a Pepsi-Cola ad, where ‘Ash', a new comer, starred with another Bollywood star Aamir Khan in the early 1990s. Over the next two decade the Bengaluru-born Rai, won the Miss World Crown, starred in a several dozen films, got covered on Vogue magazine thrice and married into Indian cinema's most well known family, to become to daughter-in-law of Bollywood's biggest star Amitabh Bachchan, Amitabh's son Abhishek, is incidentally also an actor. Through the two decades, Aishwarya was perhaps the most hankered after beauty icon in India, which is obsessed with fair skin. Before her post pregnancy beef-up, perhaps the only time that the beauty was in the news for being ‘unkempt', was when she attended an Indian television awards show in 2000, with what appeared to be a “black eye”, amidst rumors of a fight with her then boyfriend and Bollywood's mercurial kid Salman Khan. One of India's leading news agencies the Press Trust of India (PTI) writes about Aishwarya's weight issue after delivering a baby daughter Aradhya, in November last year. “The shape which Aishwarya Rai is in five months after her pregnancy has generated unusual public interest with the Bachchan bahu coming in for some criticism for the ‘oodles of weight' gained by the actress,” a PTI report has said. “The pictures set off a buzz on the internet and in the social media with articles, videos, blogs and tweets highlighting her ‘oodles of weight', ‘double chin' and calling the photos of the beauty queen ‘shocking',” the report further said.
