title: Great Depression

text: There is common consensus among economists today that the government and the central bank should work to keep the interconnected macroeconomic aggregates of gross domestic product and money supply on a stable growth path. When threatened by expectations of a depression, central banks should expand liquidity in the banking system and the government should cut taxes and accelerate spending in order to prevent a collapse in money supply and aggregate demand.


title: Great Depression

text: At the beginning of the Great Depression, most economists believed in Say's law and the equilibrating powers of the market, and failed to understand the severity of the Depression. Outright leave-it-alone liquidationism was a common position, and was universally held by Austrian School economists. The liquidationist position held that a depression worked to liquidate failed businesses and investments that had been made obsolete by technological development – releasing factors of production (capital and labor) to be redeployed in other more productive sectors of the dynamic economy. They argued that even if self-adjustment of the economy caused mass bankruptcies, it was still the best course.


title: Great Depression

text: Economists like Barry Eichengreen and J. Bradford DeLong note that President Herbert Hoover tried to keep the federal budget balanced until 1932, when he lost confidence in his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon and replaced him. An increasingly common view among economic historians is that the adherence of many Federal Reserve policymakers to the liquidationist position led to disastrous consequences. Unlike what liquidationists expected, a large proportion of the capital stock was not redeployed but vanished during the first years of the Great Depression. According to a study by Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Summers, the recession caused a drop of net capital accumulation to pre-1924 levels by 1933. Milton Friedman called leave-it-alone liquidationism "dangerous nonsense". He wrote:


title: Great Depression

text: Two prominent theorists in the Austrian School on the Great Depression include Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and American economist Murray Rothbard, who wrote "America's Great Depression" (1963). In their view, much like the monetarists, the Federal Reserve (created in 1913) shoulders much of the blame; however, unlike the Monetarists, they argue that the key cause of the Depression was the expansion of the money supply in the 1920s which led to an unsustainable credit-driven boom.


title: Great Depression

text: In the Austrian view, it was this inflation of the money supply that led to an unsustainable boom in both asset prices (stocks and bonds) and capital goods. Therefore, by the time the Federal Reserve tightened in 1928 it was far too late to prevent an economic contraction. In February 1929 Hayek published a paper predicting the Federal Reserve's actions would lead to a crisis starting in the stock and credit markets.


title: Great Depression

text: According to Rothbard, the government support for failed enterprises and efforts to keep wages above their market values actually prolonged the Depression. Unlike Rothbard, after 1970 Hayek believed that the Federal Reserve had further contributed to the problems of the Depression by permitting the money supply to shrink during the earliest years of the Depression. However, during the Depression (in 1932 and in 1934) Hayek had criticized both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England for not taking a more contractionary stance.


title: Great Depression

text: Hans Sennholz argued that most boom and busts that plagued the American economy, such as those in 1819–20, 1839–1843, 1857–1860, 1873–1878, 1893–1897, and 1920–21, were generated by government creating a boom through easy money and credit, which was soon followed by the inevitable bust.


title: Great Depression

text: Ludwig von Mises wrote in the 1930s: "Credit expansion cannot increase the supply of real goods. It merely brings about a rearrangement. It diverts capital investment away from the course prescribed by the state of economic wealth and market conditions. It causes production to pursue paths which it would not follow unless the economy were to acquire an increase in material goods. As a result, the upswing lacks a solid base. It is not real prosperity. It is illusory prosperity. It did not develop from an increase in economic wealth, i.e. the accumulation of savings made available for productive investment. Rather, it arose because the credit expansion created the illusion of such an increase. Sooner or later, it must become apparent that this economic situation is built on sand."


title: Great Depression

text: Marxists generally argue that the Great Depression was the result of the inherent instability of the capitalist mode of production. According to "Forbes", "The idea that capitalism caused the Great Depression was widely held among intellectuals and the general public for many decades."


title: Great Depression

text: Two economists of the 1920s, Waddill Catchings and William Trufant Foster, popularized a theory that influenced many policy makers, including Herbert Hoover, Henry A. Wallace, Paul Douglas, and Marriner Eccles. It held the economy produced more than it consumed, because the consumers did not have enough income. Thus the unequal distribution of wealth throughout the 1920s caused the Great Depression.


title: Great Depression

text: According to this view, the root cause of the Great Depression was a global over-investment in heavy industry capacity compared to wages and earnings from independent businesses, such as farms. The proposed solution was for the government to pump money into the consumers' pockets. That is, it must redistribute purchasing power, maintaining the industrial base, and re-inflating prices and wages to force as much of the inflationary increase in purchasing power into consumer spending. The economy was overbuilt, and new factories were not needed. Foster and Catchings recommended federal and state governments to start large construction projects, a program followed by Hoover and Roosevelt.


title: Great Depression

text: The first three decades of the 20th century saw economic output surge with electrification, mass production, and motorized farm machinery, and because of the rapid growth in productivity there was a lot of excess production capacity and the work week was being reduced. The dramatic rise in productivity of major industries in the U.S. and the effects of productivity on output, wages and the workweek are discussed by Spurgeon Bell in his book "Productivity, Wages, and National Income" (1940).


title: Great Depression

text: The majority of countries set up relief programs and most underwent some sort of political upheaval, pushing them to the right. Many of the countries in Europe and Latin America that were democracies saw them overthrown by some form of dictatorship or authoritarian rule, most famously in Germany in 1933. The Dominion of Newfoundland gave up democracy voluntarily.


title: Great Depression

text: Australia's dependence on agricultural and industrial exports meant it was one of the hardest-hit developed countries. Falling export demand and commodity prices placed massive downward pressures on wages. Unemployment reached a record high of 29% in 1932, with incidents of civil unrest becoming common. After 1932, an increase in wool and meat prices led to a gradual recovery.


title: Great Depression

text: Harshly affected by both the global economic downturn and the Dust Bowl, Canadian industrial production had by 1932 fallen to only 58% of its 1929 figure, the second-lowest level in the world after the United States, and well behind countries such as Britain, which fell to only 83% of the 1929 level. Total national income fell to 56% of the 1929 level, again worse than any country apart from the United States. Unemployment reached 27% at the depth of the Depression in 1933.


title: Great Depression

text: The League of Nations labeled Chile the country hardest hit by the Great Depression because 80% of government revenue came from exports of copper and nitrates, which were in low demand. Chile initially felt the impact of the Great Depression in 1930, when GDP dropped 14%, mining income declined 27%, and export earnings fell 28%. By 1932, GDP had shrunk to less than half of what it had been in 1929, exacting a terrible toll in unemployment and business failures.


title: Great Depression

text: Influenced profoundly by the Great Depression, many government leaders promoted the development of local industry in an effort to insulate the economy from future external shocks. After six years of government austerity measures, which succeeded in reestablishing Chile's creditworthiness, Chileans elected to office during the 1938–58 period a succession of center and left-of-center governments interested in promoting economic growth through government intervention.


title: Great Depression

text: Prompted in part by the devastating 1939 Chillán earthquake, the Popular Front government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda created the Production Development Corporation (Corporación de Fomento de la Producción, CORFO) to encourage with subsidies and direct investments an ambitious program of import substitution industrialization. Consequently, as in other Latin American countries, protectionism became an entrenched aspect of the Chilean economy.


title: Great Depression

text: China was largely unaffected by the Depression, mainly by having stuck to the Silver standard. However, the U.S. silver purchase act of 1934 created an intolerable demand on China's silver coins, and so, in the end, the silver standard was officially abandoned in 1935 in favor of the four Chinese national banks' "legal note" issues. China and the British colony of Hong Kong, which followed suit in this regard in September 1935, would be the last to abandon the silver standard. In addition, the Nationalist Government also acted energetically to modernize the legal and penal systems, stabilize prices, amortize debts, reform the banking and currency systems, build railroads and highways, improve public health facilities, legislate against traffic in narcotics and augment industrial and agricultural production. On November 3, 1935, the government instituted the fiat currency (fapi) reform, immediately stabilizing prices and also raising revenues for the government.


title: Great Depression

text: The sharp fall in commodity prices, and the steep decline in exports, hurt the economies of the European colonies in Africa and Asia. The agricultural sector was especially hard hit. For example, sisal had recently become a major export crop in Kenya and Tanganyika. During the depression, it suffered severely from low prices and marketing problems that affected all colonial commodities in Africa. Sisal producers established centralized controls for the export of their fibre. There was widespread unemployment and hardship among peasants, labourers, colonial auxiliaries, and artisans. The budgets of colonial governments were cut, which forced the reduction in ongoing infrastructure projects, such as the building and upgrading of roads, ports and communications. The budget cuts delayed the schedule for creating systems of higher education.


title: Great Depression

text: The depression severely hurt the export-based Belgian Congo economy because of the drop in international demand for raw materials and for agricultural products. For example, the price of peanuts fell from 125 to 25 centimes. In some areas, as in the Katanga mining region, employment declined by 70%. In the country as a whole, the wage labour force decreased by 72.000 and many men returned to their villages. In Leopoldville, the population decreased by 33%, because of this labour migration.


title: Great Depression

text: Political protests were not common. However, there was a growing demand that the paternalistic claims be honored by colonial governments to respond vigorously. The theme was that economic reforms were more urgently needed than political reforms. French West Africa launched an extensive program of educational reform in which "rural schools" designed to modernize agriculture would stem the flow of under-employed farm workers to cites where unemployment was high. Students were trained in traditional arts, crafts, and farming techniques and were then expected to return to their own villages and towns.


title: Great Depression

text: The crisis affected France a bit later than other countries, hitting hard around 1931. While the 1920s grew at the very strong rate of 4.43% per year, the 1930s rate fell to only 0.63%.


title: Great Depression

text: The depression was relatively mild: unemployment peaked under 5%, the fall in production was at most 20% below the 1929 output; there was no banking crisis.


title: Great Depression

text: However, the depression had drastic effects on the local economy, and partly explains the February 6, 1934 riots and even more the formation of the Popular Front, led by SFIO socialist leader Léon Blum, which won the elections in 1936. Ultra-nationalist groups also saw increased popularity, although democracy prevailed into World War II.


title: Great Depression

text: France's relatively high degree of self-sufficiency meant the damage was considerably less than in neighbouring states like Germany.


title: Great Depression

text: The Great Depression hit Germany hard. The impact of the Wall Street Crash forced American banks to end the new loans that had been funding the repayments under the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan. The financial crisis escalated out of control in mid-1931, starting with the collapse of the Credit Anstalt in Vienna in May. This put heavy pressure on Germany, which was already in political turmoil with the rise in violence of national socialist and communist movements, as well as with investor nervousness at harsh government financial policies, investors withdrew their short-term money from Germany as confidence spiraled downward. The Reichsbank lost 150 million marks in the first week of June, 540 million in the second, and 150 million in two days, June 19–20. Collapse was at hand. U.S. President Herbert Hoover called for a moratorium on payment of war reparations. This angered Paris, which depended on a steady flow of German payments, but it slowed the crisis down, and the moratorium was agreed to in July 1931. An international conference in London later in July produced no agreements but on August 19 a standstill agreement froze Germany's foreign liabilities for six months. Germany received emergency funding from private banks in New York as well as the Bank of International Settlements and the Bank of England. The funding only slowed the process. Industrial failures began in Germany, a major bank closed in July and a two-day holiday for all German banks was declared. Business failures became more frequent in July, and spread to Romania and Hungary.


title: Great Depression

text: In 1932, 90% of German reparation payments were cancelled (in the 1950s, Germany repaid all its missed reparations debts). Widespread unemployment reached 25% as every sector was hurt. The government did not increase government spending to deal with Germany's growing crisis, as they were afraid that a high-spending policy could lead to a return of the hyperinflation that had affected Germany in 1923. Germany's Weimar Republic was hit hard by the depression, as American loans to help rebuild the German economy now stopped. The unemployment rate reached nearly 30% in 1932.


title: Great Depression

text: The German political landscape was dramatically altered, leading to Adolf Hitler's rise to power. The Nazi Party rose from being peripheral to winning 18.3% of the vote in the September 1930 election and the Communist Party also made gains, while moderate forces like the Social Democratic Party, the Democratic Party and the People's Party lost seats. The next two years were marked by increased street violence between Nazis and Communists, while governments under President Paul von Hindenburg increasingly relied on rule by decree, bypassing the Reichstag. Hitler ran for the Presidency in 1932, and while he lost to the incumbent Hindenburg in the election, it marked a point during which both Nazi Party and the Communist parties rose in the years following the crash to altogether possess a Reichstag majority following the general election in July 1932. Although the Nazis lost seats in November 1932 election, they remained the largest party, and Hitler was appointed as Chancellor the following January. The government formation deal was designed to give Hitler's conservative coalition partners many checks on his power, but over the next few months, the Nazis manoeuvred to consolidate a single-party dictatorship.


title: Great Depression

text: Hitler followed an autarky economic policy, creating a network of client states and economic allies in central Europe and Latin America. By cutting wages and taking control of labor unions, plus public works spending, unemployment fell significantly by 1935. Large-scale military spending played a major role in the recovery. The policies had the effect of driving up the cost of food imports and depleting foreign currency reserves, leaving to economic impasse by 1936. Nazi Germany faced a choice of either reversing course or pressing ahead with rearmament and autarky. Hitler chose the latter route, which according to Ian Kershaw "could only be partially accomplished without territorial expansion" and therefore war.


title: Great Depression

text: The reverberations of the Great Depression hit Greece in 1932. The Bank of Greece tried to adopt deflationary policies to stave off the crises that were going on in other countries, but these largely failed. For a brief period, the drachma was pegged to the U.S. dollar, but this was unsustainable given the country's large trade deficit and the only long-term effects of this were Greece's foreign exchange reserves being almost totally wiped out in 1932. Remittances from abroad declined sharply and the value of the drachma began to plummet from 77 drachmas to the dollar in March 1931 to 111 drachmas to the dollar in April 1931. This was especially harmful to Greece as the country relied on imports from the UK, France, and the Middle East for many necessities. Greece went off the gold standard in April 1932 and declared a moratorium on all interest payments. The country also adopted protectionist policies such as import quotas, which several European countries did during the period.


title: Great Depression

text: Protectionist policies coupled with a weak drachma, stifling imports, allowed the Greek industry to expand during the Great Depression. In 1939, the Greek industrial output was 179% that of 1928. These industries were for the most part "built on sand" as one report of the Bank of Greece put it, as without massive protection they would not have been able to survive. Despite the global depression, Greece managed to suffer comparatively little, averaging an average growth rate of 3.5% from 1932 to 1939. The dictatorial regime of Ioannis Metaxas took over the Greek government in 1936, and economic growth was strong in the years leading up to the Second World War.


title: Great Depression

text: Icelandic post-World War I prosperity came to an end with the outbreak of the Great Depression. The Depression hit Iceland hard as the value of exports plummeted. The total value of Icelandic exports fell from 74 million kronur in 1929 to 48 million in 1932, and was not to rise again to the pre-1930 level until after 1939. Government interference in the economy increased: "Imports were regulated, trade with foreign currency was monopolized by state-owned banks, and loan capital was largely distributed by state-regulated funds". Due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, which cut Iceland's exports of saltfish by half, the Depression lasted in Iceland until the outbreak of World War II (when prices for fish exports soared).


title: Great Depression

text: How much India was affected has been hotly debated. Historians have argued that the Great Depression slowed long-term industrial development. Apart from two sectors—jute and coal—the economy was little affected. However, there were major negative impacts on the jute industry, as world demand fell and prices plunged. Otherwise, conditions were fairly stable. Local markets in agriculture and small-scale industry showed modest gains.


title: Great Depression

text: The Great Depression hit Italy very hard. As industries came close to failure they were bought out by the banks in a largely illusionary bail-out—the assets used to fund the purchases were largely worthless. This led to a financial crisis peaking in 1932 and major government intervention. The Industrial Reconstruction Institute (IRI) was formed in January 1933 and took control of the bank-owned companies, suddenly giving Italy the largest state-owned industrial sector in Europe (excluding the USSR). IRI did rather well with its new responsibilities—restructuring, modernising and rationalising as much as it could. It was a significant factor in post-1945 development. But it took the Italian economy until 1935 to recover the manufacturing levels of 1930—a position that was only 60% better than that of 1913.


title: Great Depression

text: The Great Depression did not strongly affect Japan. The Japanese economy shrank by 8% during 1929–31. Japan's Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo was the first to implement what have come to be identified as Keynesian economic policies: first, by large fiscal stimulus involving deficit spending; and second, by devaluing the currency. Takahashi used the Bank of Japan to sterilize the deficit spending and minimize resulting inflationary pressures. Econometric studies have identified the fiscal stimulus as especially effective.


title: Great Depression

text: The devaluation of the currency had an immediate effect. Japanese textiles began to displace British textiles in export markets. The deficit spending proved to be most profound and went into the purchase of munitions for the armed forces. By 1933, Japan was already out of the depression. By 1934, Takahashi realized that the economy was in danger of overheating, and to avoid inflation, moved to reduce the deficit spending that went towards armaments and munitions.


title: Great Depression

text: This resulted in a strong and swift negative reaction from nationalists, especially those in the army, culminating in his assassination in the course of the February 26 Incident. This had a chilling effect on all civilian bureaucrats in the Japanese government. From 1934, the military's dominance of the government continued to grow. Instead of reducing deficit spending, the government introduced price controls and rationing schemes that reduced, but did not eliminate inflation, which remained a problem until the end of World War II.


title: Great Depression

text: The deficit spending had a transformative effect on Japan. Japan's industrial production doubled during the 1930s. Further, in 1929 the list of the largest firms in Japan was dominated by light industries, especially textile companies (many of Japan's automakers, such as Toyota, have their roots in the textile industry). By 1940 light industry had been displaced by heavy industry as the largest firms inside the Japanese economy.


title: Great Depression

text: Because of high levels of U.S. investment in Latin American economies, they were severely damaged by the Depression. Within the region, Chile, Bolivia and Peru were particularly badly affected.


title: Great Depression

text: Before the 1929 crisis, links between the world economy and Latin American economies had been established through American and British investment in Latin American exports to the world. As a result, Latin Americans export industries felt the depression quickly. World prices for commodities such as wheat, coffee and copper plunged. Exports from all of Latin America to the U.S. fell in value from $1.2 billion in 1929 to $335 million in 1933, rising to $660 million in 1940.


title: Great Depression

text: But on the other hand, the depression led the area governments to develop new local industries and expand consumption and production. Following the example of the New Deal, governments in the area approved regulations and created or improved welfare institutions that helped millions of new industrial workers to achieve a better standard of living.


title: Great Depression

text: The Great Depression had severe impacts across the Middle East and North Africa, including economic decline which led to social unrest.


title: Great Depression

text: From roughly 1931 to 1937, the Netherlands suffered a deep and exceptionally long depression. This depression was partly caused by the after-effects of the American stock-market crash of 1929, and partly by internal factors in the Netherlands. Government policy, especially the very late dropping of the Gold Standard, played a role in prolonging the depression. The Great Depression in the Netherlands led to some political instability and riots, and can be linked to the rise of the Dutch fascist political party NSB. The depression in the Netherlands eased off somewhat at the end of 1936, when the government finally dropped the Gold Standard, but real economic stability did not return until after World War II.


title: Great Depression

text: New Zealand was especially vulnerable to worldwide depression, as it relied almost entirely on agricultural exports to the United Kingdom for its economy. The drop in exports led to a lack of disposable income from the farmers, who were the mainstay of the local economy. Jobs disappeared and wages plummeted, leaving people desperate and charities unable to cope. Work relief schemes were the only government support available to the unemployed, the rate of which by the early 1930s was officially around 15%, but unofficially nearly twice that level (official figures excluded Māori and women). In 1932, riots occurred among the unemployed in three of the country's main cities (Auckland, Dunedin, and Wellington). Many were arrested or injured through the tough official handling of these riots by police and volunteer "special constables".


title: Great Depression

text: Poland was affected by the Great Depression longer and stronger than other countries due to inadequate economic response of the government and the pre-existing economic circumstances of the country. At that time, Poland was under the authoritarian rule of Sanacja, whose leader, Józef Piłsudski, was opposed to leaving the gold standard until his death in 1935. As a result, Poland was unable to perform a more active monetary and budget policy. Additionally, Poland was a relatively young country that emerged merely 10 years earlier after being partitioned between German, Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires for over a century. Prior to independence, the Russian part exported 91% of its exports to Russia proper, while the German part exported 68% to Germany proper. After independence, these markets were largely lost, as Russia transformed into USSR that was mostly a closed economy, and Germany was in a tariff war with Poland throughout the 1920s.


title: Great Depression

text: Industrial production fell significantly: in 1932 hard coal production was down 27% compared to 1928, steel production was down 61%, and iron ore production noted a 89% decrease. On the other hand, electrotechnical, leather, and paper industries noted marginal increases in production output. Overall, industrial production decreased by 41%. A distinct feature of the Great Depression in Poland was the de-concentration of industry, as larger conglomerates were less flexible and paid their workers more than smaller ones.


title: Great Depression

text: Unemployment rate rose significantly (up to 43%) while nominal wages fell by 51% in 1933 and 56% in 1934, relative to 1928. However, real wages fell less due to the government's policy of decreasing cost of living, particularly food expenditures (food prices were down by 65% in 1935 compared to 1928 price levels). Material conditions deprivation led to strikes, some of them violent or violently pacified - like in Sanok ( March 6, 1930), Lesko county (Lesko uprising June 21 – July 9, 1932) and Zawiercie ( April 18, 1930).


title: Great Depression

text: To adopt to the crisis, Polish government employed deflation methods such as high interest rates, credit limits and budget austerity to keep a fixed exchange rate with currencies tied to the gold standard. Only in late 1932 the government created a plan to fight the economic crisis. Part of the plan was mass public works scheme, employing up to 100,000 people in 1935. After Piłsudski's death, in 1936 the gold standard regime was relaxed, and launching the development of the Central Industrial Region kicked off the economy, to over 10% annual growth rate in the 1936-1938 period.


title: Great Depression

text: Already under the rule of a dictatorial junta, the Ditadura Nacional, Portugal suffered no turbulent political effects of the Depression, although António de Oliveira Salazar, already appointed Minister of Finance in 1928 greatly expanded his powers and in 1932 rose to Prime Minister of Portugal to found the Estado Novo, an authoritarian corporatist dictatorship. With the budget balanced in 1929, the effects of the depression were relaxed through harsh measures towards budget balance and autarky, causing social discontent but stability and, eventually, an impressive economic growth.


title: Great Depression

text: In the years immediately preceding the depression, negative developments in the island and world economies perpetuated an unsustainable cycle of subsistence for many Puerto Rican workers. The 1920s brought a dramatic drop in Puerto Rico's two primary exports, raw sugar and coffee, due to a devastating hurricane in 1928 and the plummeting demand from global markets in the latter half of the decade. 1930 unemployment on the island was roughly 36% and by 1933 Puerto Rico's per capita income dropped 30% (by comparison, unemployment in the United States in 1930 was approximately 8% reaching a height of 25% in 1933). To provide relief and economic reform, the United States government and Puerto Rican politicians such as Carlos Chardon and Luis Muñoz Marín created and administered first the Puerto Rico Emergency Relief Administration (PRERA) 1933 and then in 1935, the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA).


title: Great Depression

text: As world trade slumped, demand for South African agricultural and mineral exports fell drastically. The Carnegie Commission on Poor Whites had concluded in 1931 that nearly one-third of Afrikaners lived as paupers. The social discomfort caused by the depression was a contributing factor in the 1933 split between the "gesuiwerde" (purified) and "smelter" (fusionist) factions within the National Party and the National Party's subsequent fusion with the South African Party. Unemployment programs were begun that focused primarily on the white population.


title: Great Depression

text: The Soviet Union was the world's only socialist state with very little international trade. Its economy was not tied to the rest of the world and was mostly unaffected by the Great Depression.


title: Great Depression

text: At the time of the Depression, the Soviet economy was growing steadily, fuelled by intensive investment in heavy industry. The apparent economic success of the Soviet Union at a time when the capitalist world was in crisis led many Western intellectuals to view the Soviet system favorably. Jennifer Burns wrote:


title: Great Depression

text: Due to having very little international trade and its policy of isolation, they did not receive the benefits of international trade once the depression ran its course, and were still effectively poorer than most developed countries at their worst sufferings in the crisis.


title: Great Depression

text: The Great Depression caused mass immigration to the Soviet Union, mostly from Finland and Germany. Soviet Russia was at first happy to help these immigrants settle, because they believed they were victims of capitalism who had come to help the Soviet cause. However, when the Soviet Union entered the war in 1941, most of these Germans and Finns were arrested and sent to Siberia, while their Russian-born children were placed in orphanages. Their fate remains unknown.


title: Great Depression

text: Spain had a relatively isolated economy, with high protective tariffs and was not one of the main countries affected by the Depression. The banking system held up well, as did agriculture.


title: Great Depression

text: By far the most serious negative impact came after 1936 from the heavy destruction of infrastructure and manpower by the civil war, 1936–39. Many talented workers were forced into permanent exile. By staying neutral in the Second World War, and selling to both sides, the economy avoided further disasters.


title: Great Depression

text: By the 1930s, Sweden had what America's "Life magazine" called in 1938 the "world's highest standard of living". Sweden was also the first country worldwide to recover completely from the Great Depression. Taking place amid a short-lived government and a less-than-a-decade old Swedish democracy, events such as those surrounding Ivar Kreuger (who eventually committed suicide) remain infamous in Swedish history. The Social Democrats under Per Albin Hansson formed their first long-lived government in 1932 based on strong interventionist and welfare state policies, monopolizing the office of Prime Minister until 1976 with the sole and short-lived exception of Axel Pehrsson-Bramstorp's "summer cabinet" in 1936. During forty years of hegemony, it was the most successful political party in the history of Western liberal democracy.


title: Great Depression

text: In Thailand, then known as the Kingdom of Siam, the Great Depression contributed to the end of the absolute monarchy of King Rama VII in the Siamese revolution of 1932.


title: Great Depression

text: The World Depression broke at a time when the United Kingdom had still not fully recovered from the effects of the First World War more than a decade earlier. The country was driven off the gold standard in 1931.


title: Great Depression

text: The world financial crisis began to overwhelm Britain in 1931; investors around the world started withdrawing their gold from London at the rate of £2.5 million per day. Credits of £25 million each from the Bank of France and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and an issue of £15 million fiduciary note slowed, but did not reverse the British crisis. The financial crisis now caused a major political crisis in Britain in August 1931. With deficits mounting, the bankers demanded a balanced budget; the divided cabinet of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government agreed; it proposed to raise taxes, cut spending and most controversially, to cut unemployment benefits by 20%. The attack on welfare was totally unacceptable to the Labour movement. MacDonald wanted to resign, but King George V insisted he remain and form an all-party coalition "National Government". The Conservative and Liberals parties signed on, along with a small cadre of Labour, but the vast majority of Labour leaders denounced MacDonald as a traitor for leading the new government. Britain went off the gold standard, and suffered relatively less than other major countries in the Great Depression. In the 1931 British election, the Labour Party was virtually destroyed, leaving MacDonald as Prime Minister for a largely Conservative coalition.


title: Great Depression

text: The effects on the northern industrial areas of Britain were immediate and devastating, as demand for traditional industrial products collapsed. By the end of 1930 unemployment had more than doubled from 1 million to 2.5 million (20% of the insured workforce), and exports had fallen in value by 50%. In 1933, 30% of Glaswegians were unemployed due to the severe decline in heavy industry. In some towns and cities in the north east, unemployment reached as high as 70% as shipbuilding fell by 90%. The National Hunger March of September–October 1932 was the largest of a series of hunger marches in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. About 200,000 unemployed men were sent to the work camps, which continued in operation until 1939.


title: Great Depression

text: In the less industrial Midlands and Southern England, the effects were short-lived and the later 1930s were a prosperous time. Growth in modern manufacture of electrical goods and a boom in the motor car industry was helped by a growing southern population and an expanding middle class. Agriculture also saw a boom during this period.


title: Great Depression

text: Hoover's first measures to combat the depression were based on encouraging businesses not to reduce their workforce or cut wages but businesses had little choice: wages were reduced, workers were laid off, and investments postponed.


title: Great Depression

text: In June 1930, Congress approved the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act which raised tariffs on thousands of imported items. The intent of the Act was to encourage the purchase of American-made products by increasing the cost of imported goods, while raising revenue for the federal government and protecting farmers. Most countries that traded with the U.S. increased tariffs on American-made goods in retaliation, reducing international trade, and worsening the Depression.


title: Great Depression

text: In 1931, Hoover urged bankers to set up the National Credit Corporation so that big banks could help failing banks survive. But bankers were reluctant to invest in failing banks, and the National Credit Corporation did almost nothing to address the problem.


title: Great Depression

text: By 1932, unemployment had reached 23.6%, peaking in early 1933 at 25%. Those releasing from prison during this period had an especially difficult time finding employment given the stigma of their criminal records, which often led to recidivism out of economic desperation. Drought persisted in the agricultural heartland, businesses and families defaulted on record numbers of loans, and more than 5,000 banks had failed. Hundreds of thousands of Americans found themselves homeless, and began congregating in shanty towns – dubbed "Hoovervilles" – that began to appear across the country. In response, President Hoover and Congress approved the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, to spur new home construction, and reduce foreclosures. The final attempt of the Hoover Administration to stimulate the economy was the passage of the Emergency Relief and Construction Act (ERA) which included funds for public works programs such as dams and the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in 1932. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was a Federal agency with the authority to lend up to $2 billion to rescue banks and restore confidence in financial institutions. But $2 billion was not enough to save all the banks, and bank runs and bank failures continued. Quarter by quarter the economy went downhill, as prices, profits and employment fell, leading to the political realignment in 1932 that brought to power Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is important to note, however, that after volunteerism failed, Hoover developed ideas that laid the framework for parts of the New Deal.


title: Great Depression

text: Shortly after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933, drought and erosion combined to cause the Dust Bowl, shifting hundreds of thousands of displaced persons off their farms in the Midwest. From his inauguration onward, Roosevelt argued that restructuring of the economy would be needed to prevent another depression or avoid prolonging the current one. New Deal programs sought to stimulate demand and provide work and relief for the impoverished through increased government spending and the institution of financial reforms.


title: Great Depression

text: During a "bank holiday" that lasted five days, the Emergency Banking Act was signed into law. It provided for a system of reopening sound banks under Treasury supervision, with federal loans available if needed. The Securities Act of 1933 comprehensively regulated the securities industry. This was followed by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 which created the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although amended, key provisions of both Acts are still in force. Federal insurance of bank deposits was provided by the FDIC, and the Glass–Steagall Act.


title: Great Depression

text: The Agricultural Adjustment Act provided incentives to cut farm production in order to raise farming prices. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) made a number of sweeping changes to the American economy. It forced businesses to work with government to set price codes through the NRA to fight deflationary "cut-throat competition" by the setting of minimum prices and wages, labor standards, and competitive conditions in all industries. It encouraged unions that would raise wages, to increase the purchasing power of the working class. The NRA was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1935.


title: Great Depression

text: These reforms, together with several other relief and recovery measures, are called the First New Deal. Economic stimulus was attempted through a new alphabet soup of agencies set up in 1933 and 1934 and previously extant agencies such as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. By 1935, the "Second New Deal" added Social Security (which was later considerably extended through the Fair Deal), a jobs program for the unemployed (the Works Progress Administration, WPA) and, through the National Labor Relations Board, a strong stimulus to the growth of labor unions. In 1929, federal expenditures constituted only 3% of the GDP. The national debt as a proportion of GNP rose under Hoover from 20% to 40%. Roosevelt kept it at 40% until the war began, when it soared to 128%.


title: Great Depression

text: By 1936, the main economic indicators had regained the levels of the late 1920s, except for unemployment, which remained high at 11%, although this was considerably lower than the 25% unemployment rate seen in 1933. In the spring of 1937, American industrial production exceeded that of 1929 and remained level until June 1937. In June 1937, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and increased taxation in an attempt to balance the federal budget.


title: Great Depression

text: The American economy then took a sharp downturn, lasting for 13 months through most of 1938. Industrial production fell almost 30 per cent within a few months and production of durable goods fell even faster. Unemployment jumped from 14.3% in 1937 to 19.0% in 1938, rising from 5 million to more than 12 million in early 1938. Manufacturing output fell by 37% from the 1937 peak and was back to 1934 levels.


title: Great Depression

text: Producers reduced their expenditures on durable goods, and inventories declined, but personal income was only 15% lower than it had been at the peak in 1937. As unemployment rose, consumers' expenditures declined, leading to further cutbacks in production. By May 1938 retail sales began to increase, employment improved, and industrial production turned up after June 1938. After the recovery from the Recession of 1937–38, conservatives were able to form a bipartisan conservative coalition to stop further expansion of the New Deal and, when unemployment dropped to 2% in the early 1940s, they abolished WPA, CCC and the PWA relief programs. Social Security remained in place.


title: Great Depression

text: Between 1933 and 1939, federal expenditure tripled, and Roosevelt's critics charged that he was turning America into a socialist state. The Great Depression was a main factor in the implementation of social democracy and planned economies in European countries after World War II (see Marshall Plan). Keynesianism generally remained the most influential economic school in the United States and in parts of Europe until the periods between the 1970s and the 1980s, when Milton Friedman and other neoliberal economists formulated and propagated the newly created theories of neoliberalism and incorporated them into the Chicago School of Economics as an alternative approach to the study of economics. Neoliberalism went on to challenge the dominance of the Keynesian school of Economics in the mainstream academia and policy-making in the United States, having reached its peak in popularity in the election of the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom.


title: Great Depression

text: The Great Depression has been the subject of much writing, as authors have sought to evaluate an era that caused both financial and emotional trauma. Perhaps the most noteworthy and famous novel written on the subject is "The Grapes of Wrath", published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the work, and in 1962 was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers who are forced from their home as drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agricultural industry occur during the Great Depression. Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men" is another important novella about a journey during the Great Depression. Additionally, Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" is set during the Great Depression. Margaret Atwood's Booker prize-winning "The Blind Assassin" is likewise set in the Great Depression, centering on a privileged socialite's love affair with a Marxist revolutionary. The era spurred the resurgence of social realism, practiced by many who started their writing careers on relief programs, especially the Federal Writers' Project in the U.S. Nonfiction works from this time also capture important themes. The 1933 memoir "Prison Days and Nights" by Victor Folke Nelson provides insight into criminal justice ramifications of the Great Depression, especially in regard to patterns of recidivism due to lack of economic opportunity.


title: Great Depression

text: A number of works for younger audiences are also set during the Great Depression, among them the Kit Kittredge series of "American Girl" books written by Valerie Tripp and illustrated by Walter Rane, released to tie in with the dolls and playsets sold by the company. The stories, which take place during the early to mid 1930s in Cincinnati, focuses on the changes brought by the Depression to the titular character's family and how the Kittredges dealt with it. A theatrical adaptation of the series entitled "" was later released in 2008 to positive reviews. Similarly, "Christmas After All", part of the "Dear America" series of books for older girls, take place in 1930s Indianapolis; while "Kit Kittredge" is told in a third-person viewpoint, "Christmas After All" is in the form of a fictional journal as told by the protagonist Minnie Swift as she recounts her experiences during the era, especially when her family takes in an orphan cousin from Texas.


title: Great Depression

text: The term "The Great Depression" is most frequently attributed to British economist Lionel Robbins, whose 1934 book "The Great Depression" is credited with formalizing the phrase, though Hoover is widely credited with popularizing the term, informally referring to the downturn as a depression, with such uses as "Economic depression cannot be cured by legislative action or executive pronouncement" (December 1930, Message to Congress), and "I need not recount to you that the world is passing through a great depression" (1931).


title: Great Depression

text: The term "depression" to refer to an economic downturn dates to the 19th century, when it was used by varied Americans and British politicians and economists. Indeed, the first major American economic crisis, the Panic of 1819, was described by then-president James Monroe as "a depression", and the most recent economic crisis, the Depression of 1920–21, had been referred to as a "depression" by then-president Calvin Coolidge.


title: Great Depression

text: Financial crises were traditionally referred to as "panics", most recently the major Panic of 1907, and the minor Panic of 1910–11, though the 1929 crisis was called "The Crash", and the term "panic" has since fallen out of use. At the time of the Great Depression, the term "The Great Depression" was already used to refer to the period 1873–96 (in the United Kingdom), or more narrowly 1873–79 (in the United States), which has retroactively been renamed the Long Depression.


title: Great Depression

text: The causes of the Great Recession seem similar to the Great Depression, but significant differences exist. The then-chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, had extensively studied the Great Depression as part of his doctoral work at MIT, and implemented policies to manipulate the money supply and interest rates in ways that were not done in the 1930s. Bernanke's policies will undoubtedly be analyzed and scrutinized in the years to come, as economists debate the wisdom of his choices. In 2011, one journalist contrasted the Great Depression of the 1930s as opposed to the late-2000s recession.


title: Great Depression

text: 1928 and 1929 were the times in the 20th century that the wealth gap reached such skewed extremes; half the unemployed had been out of work for over six months, something that was not repeated until the late-2000s recession. 2007 and 2008 eventually saw the world reach new levels of wealth gap inequality that rivalled the years of 1928 and 1929.


title: Capybara

text: The capybara or greater capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) is a giant cavy rodent native to South America. It is the largest living rodent and a member of the genus "Hydrochoerus". The only other extant member is the lesser capybara ("Hydrochoerus isthmius"). Its close relatives include guinea pigs and rock cavies, and it is more distantly related to the agouti, the chinchilla, and the nutria. The capybara inhabits savannas and dense forests, and lives near bodies of water. It is a highly social species and can be found in groups as large as 100 individuals, but usually live in groups of 10–20 individuals. The capybara is hunted for its meat and hide and also for grease from its thick fatty skin. It is not considered a threatened species.


title: Capybara

text: Its common name is derived from Tupi ', a complex agglutination of ' (leaf) + ' (slender) + ' (eat) + "" (a suffix for agent nouns), meaning "one who eats slender leaves", or "grass-eater".


title: Capybara

text: The scientific name, both "hydrochoerus" and "hydrochaeris", comes from Greek (' "water") and (' "pig, hog").


title: Capybara

text: The capybara and the lesser capybara both belong to the subfamily Hydrochoerinae along with the rock cavies. The living capybaras and their extinct relatives were previously classified in their own family Hydrochoeridae. Since 2002, molecular phylogenetic studies have recognized a close relationship between "Hydrochoerus" and "Kerodon", the rock cavies, supporting placement of both genera in a subfamily of Caviidae.


title: Capybara

text: Paleontological classifications previously used Hydrochoeridae for all capybaras, while using Hydrochoerinae for the living genus and its closest fossil relatives, such as "Neochoerus", but more recently have adopted the classification of Hydrochoerinae within Caviidae. The taxonomy of fossil hydrochoerines is also in a state of flux. In recent years, the diversity of fossil hydrochoerines has been substantially reduced. This is largely due to the recognition that capybara molar teeth show strong variation in shape over the life of an individual. In one instance, material once referred to four genera and seven species on the basis of differences in molar shape is now thought to represent differently aged individuals of a single species, "Cardiatherium paranense".


title: Capybara

text: Among fossil species, the name "capybara" can refer to the many species of Hydrochoerinae that are more closely related to the modern "Hydrochoerus" than to the "cardiomyine" rodents like "Cardiomys". The fossil genera "Cardiatherium", "Phugatherium", "Hydrochoeropsis", and "Neochoerus" are all capybaras under that concept.


title: Capybara

text: The capybara has a heavy, barrel-shaped body and short head, with reddish-brown fur on the upper part of its body that turns yellowish-brown underneath. Its sweat glands can be found in the surface of the hairy portions of its skin, an unusual trait among rodents. The animal lacks down hair, and its guard hair differs little from over hair.Adult capybaras grow to in length, stand tall at the withers, and typically weigh , with an average in the Venezuelan llanos of . Females are slightly heavier than males. The top recorded weights are for a wild female from Brazil and for a wild male from Uruguay. Also, an 81 kg individual was reported in São Paulo in 2001 or 2002. The dental formula is . Capybaras have slightly webbed feet and vestigial tails. Their hind legs are slightly longer than their forelegs; they have three toes on their rear feet and four toes on their front feet. Their muzzles are blunt, with nostrils, and the eyes and ears are near the top of their heads.


title: Capybara

text: Capybaras are semiaquatic mammals found throughout all countries of South America except Chile. They live in densely forested areas near bodies of water, such as lakes, rivers, swamps, ponds, and marshes, as well as flooded savannah and along rivers in the tropical rainforest. They are superb swimmers and can hold their breath underwater for up to five minutes at a time. Capybara have flourished in cattle ranches. They roam in home ranges averaging 10 hectares (25 acres) in high-density populations.


title: Capybara

text: Many escapees from captivity can also be found in similar watery habitats around the world. Sightings are fairly common in Florida, although a breeding population has not yet been confirmed. In 2011, one specimen was spotted on the Central Coast of California. These escaped populations occur in areas where prehistoric capybaras inhabited; late Pleistocene capybaras inhabited Florida and "Hydrochoerus hesperotiganites" in California and "Hydrochoerus gaylordi" in Grenada, and feral capybaras in North America may actually fill the ecological niche of the Pleistocene species.


title: Capybara

text: Capybaras are herbivores, grazing mainly on grasses and aquatic plants, as well as fruit and tree bark. They are very selective feeders and feed on the leaves of one species and disregard other species surrounding it. They eat a greater variety of plants during the dry season, as fewer plants are available. While they eat grass during the wet season, they have to switch to more abundant reeds during the dry season. Plants that capybaras eat during the summer lose their nutritional value in the winter, so they are not consumed at that time. The capybara's jaw hinge is not perpendicular, so they chew food by grinding back-and-forth rather than side-to-side. Capybaras are autocoprophagous, meaning they eat their own feces as a source of bacterial gut flora, to help digest the cellulose in the grass that forms their normal diet, and to extract the maximum protein and vitamins from their food. They also regurgitate food to masticate again, similar to cud-chewing by cattle. As is the case with other rodents, the front teeth of capybaras grow continually to compensate for the constant wear from eating grasses; their cheek teeth also grow continuously.


title: Capybara

text: Like its relative the guinea pig, the capybara does not have the capacity to synthesize vitamin C, and capybaras not supplemented with vitamin C in captivity have been reported to develop gum disease as a sign of scurvy.


title: Capybara

text: They can have a lifespan of 8–10 years, but tend to live less than four years in the wild due to predation from jaguars, pumas, ocelots, eagles, and caimans. The capybara is also the preferred prey of the green anaconda.


title: Capybara

text: Capybaras are known to be gregarious. While they sometimes live solitarily, they are more commonly found in groups of around 10–20 individuals, with two to four adult males, four to seven adult females, and the remainder juveniles. Capybara groups can consist of as many as 50 or 100 individuals during the dry season when the animals gather around available water sources. Males establish social bonds, dominance, or general group consensus. They can make dog-like barks when threatened or when females are herding young.


title: Capybara

text: Capybaras have two types of scent glands: a morrillo, located on the snout, and anal glands. Both sexes have these glands, but males have much larger morrillos and use their anal glands more frequently. The anal glands of males are also lined with detachable hairs. A crystalline form of scent secretion is coated on these hairs and is released when in contact with objects such as plants. These hairs have a longer-lasting scent mark and are tasted by other capybaras. Capybaras scent-mark by rubbing their morrillos on objects, or by walking over scrub and marking it with their anal glands. Capybaras can spread their scent further by urinating; however, females usually mark without urinating and scent-mark less frequently than males overall. Females mark more often during the wet season when they are in estrus. In addition to objects, males also scent-mark females.


title: Capybara

text: When in estrus, the female's scent changes subtly and nearby males begin pursuit. In addition, a female alerts males she is in estrus by whistling through her nose. During mating, the female has the advantage and mating choice. Capybaras mate only in water, and if a female does not want to mate with a certain male, she either submerges or leaves the water. Dominant males are highly protective of the females, but they usually cannot prevent some of the subordinates from copulating. The larger the group, the harder it is for the male to watch all the females. Dominant males secure significantly more matings than each subordinate, but subordinate males, as a class, are responsible for more matings than each dominant male. The lifespan of the capybara's sperm is longer than that of other rodents.


title: Capybara

text: Capybara gestation is 130–150 days, and produces a litter of four young on average, but may produce between one and eight in a single litter. Birth is on land and the female rejoins the group within a few hours of delivering the newborn capybaras, which join the group as soon as they are mobile. Within a week, the young can eat grass, but continue to suckle—from any female in the group—until weaned around 16 weeks. The young form a group within the main group. Alloparenting has been observed in this species. Breeding peaks between April and May in Venezuela and between October and November in Mato Grosso, Brazil.


title: Capybara

text: Though quite agile on land, capybaras are equally at home in the water. They are excellent swimmers, and can remain completely submerged for up to five minutes, an ability they use to evade predators. Capybaras can sleep in water, keeping only their noses out. As temperatures increase during the day, they wallow in water and then graze during the late afternoon and early evening. They also spend time wallowing in mud. They rest around midnight and then continue to graze before dawn.


title: Capybara

text: Capybaras are not considered a threatened species; their population is stable throughout most of their South American range, though in some areas hunting has reduced their numbers.


title: Capybara

text: Capybaras are hunted for their meat and pelts in some areas, and otherwise killed by humans who see their grazing as competition for livestock. In some areas, they are farmed, which has the effect of ensuring the wetland habitats are protected. Their survival is aided by their ability to breed rapidly.


title: Capybara

text: Capybaras have adapted well to urbanization in South America. They can be found in many areas in zoos and parks, and may live for 12 years in captivity, more than double their wild lifespan. Capybaras are docile and usually allow humans to pet and hand-feed them, but physical contact is normally discouraged, as their ticks can be vectors to Rocky Mountain spotted fever.


title: Capybara

text: The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria asked Drusillas Park in Alfriston, Sussex, England, to keep the studbook for capybaras, to monitor captive populations in Europe. The studbook includes information about all births, deaths and movements of capybaras, as well as how they are related.


title: Capybara

text: Capybaras are farmed for meat and skins in South America. The meat is considered unsuitable to eat in some areas, while in other areas it is considered an important source of protein. In parts of South America, especially in Venezuela, capybara meat is popular during Lent and Holy Week as the Catholic Church previously issued special dispensation to allow it to be eaten while other meats are generally forbidden.


title: Capybara

text: After several attempts a 1784 Papal bull was obtained that allowed the consumption of capybara during Lent.


title: Capybara

text: There is widespread perception in Venezuela that consumption of capybaras is exclusive to rural people.


title: Capybara

text: In Japan, following the lead of Izu Shaboten Zoo in 1982, multiple establishments or zoos in Japan that raise capybaras have adopted the practice of having them relax in onsen during the winter. They are seen as an attraction by Japanese people. Capybaras became big in Japan due to the popular cartoon character .


title: Capybara

text: In August 2021, Argentine and international media reported that capybaras had been causing serious problems for residents of Nordelta, an affluent gated community north of Buenos Aires built atop wetland habitat. This inspired Argentine and worldwide leftists to jokingly adopt the capybara as a symbol of class struggle and communism.


title: Capybara

text: Brazilian Lyme-like borreliosis likely involves capybaras as reservoirs and "Amblyomma" and "Rhipicephalus" ticks as vectors.


title: Capybara

text: In the early 2020s, capybaras became a growing figure of meme culture due to many factors, including the disturbances in Nordelta which led to them being comically postulated as figures of class struggle. Also, a common meme format includes capybaras in various situations with the song "After Party" by Don Toliver, leading to a tremendous growth in popularity. Due to a lyric in Toliver's song, capybaras are also associated with the phrase "Ok I pull up".


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan ( Rai; born 1 November 1973) is an Indian actress who is primarily known for her work in Hindi and Tamil films. The winner of the Miss World 1994 pageant, she has established herself as one of the most popular celebrities in India. Rai has received numerous accolades, including two Filmfare Awards, and was honoured with the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 2009 and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Government of France in 2012. She has often been cited in the media as "the most beautiful woman in the world".


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: While in college, Rai did a few modelling jobs. Following appearances in several television commercials, she entered the Miss India pageant, in which she placed second. She was then crowned Miss World 1994, after which she began receiving offers to act in film. She made her acting debut in Mani Ratnam's 1997 Tamil film "Iruvar" and had her first Hindi film release in "Aur Pyaar Ho Gaya" that same year. Her first commercial success was the Tamil romantic drama "Jeans" (1998), which was the most expensive Indian film at the time. She achieved wider success and won two Filmfare Awards for Best Actress for her performances in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's romantic dramas "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam" (1999) and "Devdas" (2002).


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai garnered critical appreciation for portraying a passionate artist in the Tamil romance film "Kandukondain Kandukondain" (2000), Tagore's heroine, Binodini, in the Bengali film "Chokher Bali" (2003), a depressed woman in the drama "Raincoat" (2004), Kiranjit Ahluwalia in the British drama film "Provoked" (2006), and a nurse in Bhansali's drama "Guzaarish" (2010). Rai's greatest commercial successes have been the romantic drama "Mohabbatein" (2000), the adventure film "Dhoom 2" (2006), the drama "Guru" (2007), the period film "Jodhaa Akbar" (2008), the science fiction film "Enthiran" (2010), the romantic drama "Ae Dil Hai Mushkil" (2016), and the period film "" (2022).


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai married actor Abhishek Bachchan in 2007; the couple have one daughter. Her off-screen roles include duties as a brand ambassador for several charity organisations and campaigns. She is a Goodwill Ambassador for the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS (UNAIDS). In 2003, she was the first Indian actress to be a jury member at the Cannes Film Festival.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai was born on 1 November 1973 into a Tulu-speaking Bunt family in Mangalore, Karnataka. Her father, Krishnaraj, who died on 18 March 2017, was an Army biologist, while her mother, Vrinda, is a housewife. She has one elder brother, Aditya Rai, who is an engineer in the merchant navy. Rai's movie "Dil Ka Rishta" (2003) was co-produced by her brother and co-written by her mother. The family moved to Mumbai, where Rai attended the Arya Vidya Mandir High School. Rai did her intermediate schooling at Jai Hind College for a year, and then joined DG Ruparel College in Matunga, securing 90 percent in the HSC exams.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: She trained in classical dance and music for five years during her teens. Her favourite subject was zoology, and she initially considered a career in medicine. Then, with plans to become an architect, she enrolled at Rachana Sansad Academy of Architecture, but later gave up her education to pursue a career in modelling.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In 1991, Rai won an international supermodel contest (organised by Ford) and was eventually featured in the American edition of "Vogue". In 1993, Rai gained huge public recognition for her appearance in a Pepsi commercial with actors Aamir Khan and Mahima Chaudhry. The single line – "Hi, I'm Sanjana," of her dialogue in the commercial made her instantly famous. In the 1994 "Miss India" pageant, she won second place, behind Sushmita Sen, and was crowned "Miss India World", also winning five other sub-titles, "Miss Catwalk", "Miss Miraculous", "Miss Photogenic", "Miss Perfect Ten" and "Miss Popular". With Sen representing India at the Miss Universe pageant, Rai's duties as the first runner-up included representing India in the rival Miss World Pageant, held that year in Sun City, South Africa. She went on to win the crown where she also won the "Miss Photogenic" award and Miss World Continental Queen of Beauty − Asia and Oceania. After winning the pageant, Rai spoke of her dream for peace for this world, and her desire to be an ambassador of peace during her one-year reign in London. Rai continued to pursue a career as a model until she became an actress.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai made her acting debut in 1997 with Mani Ratnam's Tamil film "Iruvar", a semi-biographical political drama, featuring Mohanlal, Prakash Raj, Tabu and Revathi. The film was a critical success and among other awards, won the Best Film award at the Belgrade International Film Festival. Rai featured as Pushpavalli and Kalpana – dual roles; the latter was a fictionalised portrayal of politician and former actress Jayalalithaa. Her dialogue in the film was dubbed by Tamil actress Rohini. That same year, she was cast as Ashi, a naive teenager in her first Bollywood film – "Aur Pyaar Ho Gaya", a romantic comedy opposite Bobby Deol. Both "Iruvar" and "Aur Pyaar Ho Gaya" were commercial failures and reviewers were critical of Rai's acting ability in both the films. However, for the latter, she won a Screen Award for Best Female Debut.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In the 1998 big-budget Tamil romantic drama "Jeans" directed by S. Shankar, Rai appeared alongside Prashanth. She played Madhumita, a young woman who accompanies her ailing grandmother to the United States to seek medical attention. A commercial success, the film earned Rai praise for her acting and dancing skills. Unlike in "Iruvar", Rai practised and dubbed for her own lines in Tamil for the film. "Jeans" was later submitted as India's official entry to the Academy Awards for 1998.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai's first role in 1999 was in the melodrama "Aa Ab Laut Chalen", directed by Rishi Kapoor. The film was a critical failure and had a below average performance at the box office. Rai's portrayal of Pooja Walia, a traditional Indian woman living in the United States, met with negative reviews; "Rediff.com" published, "Rai sports a plastic smile and never gets a scene where she can portray any depth. All she does is cry and smile and look pretty". Also in 1999, she starred in the romantic musical "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam", which became a significant turning point in her career. The film, an adaptation of Maitreyi Devi's Bengali novel "Na Hanyate", was directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali and co-starred Salman Khan and Ajay Devgan. She played Nandini, a Gujarati woman who is forced into wedlock (with Devgan's character) despite being in love with another man (played by Khan). Bhansali cast Rai after he met her at the screening of a film and was impressed with her eyes. Khalid Mohamed of "Bombay Talkies" wrote that Rai "reveals an unquestionable felicity for acting" and has "that impossible combination of breathtaking beauty and brains". "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam" emerged as a commercial success and won Rai a Filmfare Award for Best Actress.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai next took up the leading role of Mansi, an aspiring singer, in Subhash Ghai's musical romantic drama "Taal"; alongside Akshay Khanna and Anil Kapoor. A reviewer for "Rediff" praised her acting and dancing prowess in the film and wrote that ""Taal" will again enhance her reputation as an actress while in no way detracting from her image as a traffic-stopper". A domestic commercial success, "Taal" was notable for being the first Indian film to feature in the top 20 listing at the American box office. Rai received a second Best Actress nomination that year at the Filmfare Awards ceremony.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In 2000, Rai starred in "Kandukondain Kandukondain", a Tamil language adaptation of Jane Austen's novel "Sense and Sensibility". Directed by Rajiv Menon, the film also starred Mammooty, Tabu and Ajith Kumar in prominent roles. Rai was cast as Meenakshi (based on the character of Marianne Dashwood), the younger sister of Tabu's character. The film was a critical and commercial success and earned Rai positive comments from critics; a review carried by "The Indian Express" summarized, "Attacking her role with just the perfect dollop of innocence, Rai does full justice to her part, and matches up perfectly to Tabu."


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai next starred alongside Shah Rukh Khan and Chandrachur Singh in the action drama "Josh". She portrayed Shirley Dias, the twin sister of Khan's character who falls in love with his arch enemy's brother (played by Singh). The casting of Rai as Khan's sister was considered an unusual pairing at the time; director Mansoor Khan, however, described it as "perfect". Despite earning mixed reviews from film critics, "Josh" emerged as a commercial success. Satish Kaushik's social drama "Hamara Dil Aapke Paas Hai" was Rai's next release; she played a rape victim in the film. Co-starring Anil Kapoor and Sonali Bendre, the film was well received by critics and did well at the box office. Film critic Sukanya Verma praised Rai's decision to star in the film and added that she "conveys the turmoil and pain of a rape victim well. But it is her transition from an emotional wreck trying to gather the broken pieces of her life back together that is amazing." Rai's performance in the film eventually earned a third Best Actress nomination at Filmfare.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Following a leading role in the box-office flop "Dhai Akshar Prem Ke", Rai took on a supporting role in Aditya Chopra's musical romantic drama "Mohabbatein". Rai played Megha Shankar, the daughter of Amitabh Bachchan's character who commits suicide after realizing that her father will not accept her romance with one of his students (played by Shah Rukh Khan). Receiving highly positive reviews from critics, "Mohabbatein" emerged as the highest-grossing film of the year and earned Rai a nomination for the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actress. The following year, she starred alongside Govinda and Jackie Shroff in the romantic comedy "Albela". Upon release, both the film and her performance received mostly negative reviews; Taran Adarsh of "Bollywood Hungama" criticized the film and mentioned Rai as "plastic in some scenes".


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In 2001, Rai appeared in her first world tour, which was "Craze 2001", a series of concerts that was performed across the US alongside Anil Kapoor, Aamir Khan, Preity Zinta and Gracy Singh. The show faced early cancellation due to the 11 September 2001 attacks, and the team prepared to return to India as soon as possible. However, the shows continued successfully in Canada.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: After featuring in David Dhawan's slapstick comedy film "Hum Kisise Kum Nahin", Rai appeared alongside Shah Rukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's period romantic drama "Devdas", an adaptation of Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay's novel of the same name. She played the role of Paro (Parvati), the love interest of the protagonist (played by Khan). The film was screened at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival and was featured by "Time" in their listing of the "10 Best Films of the Millennium". "Devdas" emerged as a major international success with revenues of over . Alan Morrison, writing for "Empire", praised the performances of the three leads and wrote, "Rai proves she has the acting talent to back up her flawless looks". "Devdas" was chosen as India's official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and received a nomination at the BAFTA Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category. In India, the film won 10 Filmfare Awards, including a second Best Actress award for Rai. Also in 2002, she participated in the show "From India With Love" in the UK, along with Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta. It took place at two outdoor venues, Manchester's Old Trafford and London's Hyde Park, with over 100,000 spectators.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In 2003, Rai featured in two romantic dramas — her brother's production début "Dil Ka Rishta", alongside Arjun Rampal, and Rohan Sippy's "Kuch Naa Kaho", alongside Abhishek Bachchan. Neither of these films fared well critically or commercially. She was later noted for her starring role in Rituparno Ghosh's independent Bengali film "Chokher Bali", an adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore's novel of the same name. She portrayed the character of Binodini, an emotionally manipulative widow, struggling with her sexual desires in early-20th century Bengal. The film was a major critical success and Rai earned positive notice for her performance; Derek Elley of "Variety" noted, "Rai dominates the film with her delicately sensual presence and physical grace". Commercially, the film was a sleeper hit.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: After the success of "Chokher Bali", Rai returned to mainstream Hindi film with Rajkumar Santoshi's "Khakee" (2004), an action thriller featuring Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgan and Tusshar Kapoor. The film tells the story of five constables embroiled in a mystery surrounding a terrorist attack; Rai's role was that of Mahalakshmi, a gun moll. While filming for "Khakee", Rai was accidentally hit by a running car, which resulted in the fracture of her left foot. Upon release, the film was a moderate critical and commercial success. In her next release, the romantic comedy "Kyun! Ho Gaya Na...", Rai played Diya Malhotra, a university student who develops a one-sided attraction toward her friend Arjun Khanna (played by Vivek Oberoi). The film received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, but was commercially unsuccessful.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai garnered international recognition in 2004 for her starring role opposite Martin Henderson in Gurinder Chadha's British film "Bride and Prejudice", a Bollywood-style adaptation of Jane Austen's novel "Pride and Prejudice". International film critics expressed mixed views on Rai's performance as the Punjabi version of Elizabeth Bennet; a review carried by "The New York Times" mentioned her as "radiantly beautiful but inert", while "Rolling Stone" noted that "she is a world-class hottie with talent to match, as she proves in her first English-speaking role." With a worldwide gross of $24 million against a production budget of $7 million, "Bride and Prejudice" proved to be a commercial success. Rai next collaborated with director Rituparno Ghosh for the second time on the 2004 relationship drama "Raincoat", an adaptation of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi", which won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi. Critics praised the film and also noted the lack of glamour in Rai's role, which earned her a Best Actress nomination at Filmfare. Derek Elley of "Variety" called the film a "chamber-sized gem" and mentioned Rai for "[s]hunning her usual immaculate makeup and duds, and looking more like a broken, malfunctioning doll." On the contrary, Gautaman Bhaskaran of "The Hindu" thought that Rai "looks quite plain [and] seems to have made an earnest effort to emote, using less of her body and limbs and more of her face, and eyes in particular."


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai next co-starred alongside Sanjay Dutt and Zayed Khan in the 2005 adult drama "Shabd", which tells the story of an author who convinces his wife to pursue an illicit relationship with a younger man in research for his next book. The film received predominantly negative reviews and proved to be a commercial failure. "The Times of India" concluded, "For the umpteenth time, Ms. Rai looks drop-dead gorgeous. And that's about it. She is like that picture postcard you get when what you were actually waiting for is a letter. It's very beautiful to look at, but is of no use because it says nothing." The same year, Rai took on the lead role of Tilo in Paul Mayeda Berges's romantic fantasy film "The Mistress of Spices", an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The film received negative reviews from film critics and emerged as a commercial failure. Peter Bradshaw of "The Guardian" termed Rai's performance as "annoying" and wrote that she "wafts and simpers" through the entire film. Rai's only successful venture of 2005 was a special appearance in Shaad Ali's crime comedy "Bunty Aur Babli", in which she featured in the widely popular item number "Kajra Re" alongside the film's male leads, her future husband Abhishek Bachchan and her future father-in-law Amitabh Bachchan.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai had two film releases in 2006, J. P. Dutta's "Umrao Jaan" and Yash Raj Films' "Dhoom 2". The former, an adaptation of Mirza Hadi Ruswa's Urdu novel "Umrao Jaan Ada" (1905), tells the story of a doomed courtesan from 19th-century Lucknow. Rai played the titular role, a character famously played by Rekha in the first film adaptation of the novel. Reviewers, while comparing the film to its previous adaptation, were critical of the film as well as of Rai's performance. "BBC" noted, "While only Rai could emulate the grace and poise of Rekha, she doesn't quite capture the intensity of Umrao's abiding melancholy", adding that "Rai's incandescent beauty and artistry [..] does indeed keep the audience watching, though not necessarily emotionally engaged."


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In the Sanjay Gadhvi-directed adventure film "Dhoom 2", Rai portrayed Sunehri, a petty thief who helps the police catch an illusive criminal; the film had an ensemble cast including Hrithik Roshan, Abhishek Bachchan, Bipasha Basu, and Uday Chopra. Despite receiving mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, "Dhoom 2" was Rai's first major commercial success since "Devdas"; the film was declared a blockbuster, and became the highest grossing Indian film of 2006 with gross revenues of over . "Rediff.com" commented, "[She] is all gloss and no depth. You seldom feel any tension in her behaviour and expressions. [..] Sunehri enters the film nearly 50 minutes after its opening in a disguise. In no time, she is wearing the flimsiest of clothes. Once she opens her mouth—and she does it two minutes after appearing in the film—she spoils the image." Nonetheless, her performance earned her a sixth Filmfare Award nomination in the Best Actress category.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In 2007, Rai played the wife of Abhishek Bachchan's character in Mani Ratnam's social drama "Guru". A fictionalized biography of businessman Dhirubhai Ambani, "Guru" tells the rag to riches story of an uneducated man who builds a multinational corporation. The film met with international critical acclaim and emerged as a box-office success. Richard Corliss of "Time" labelled her character as an "ornament", but Raja Sen from "Rediff" described it as "arguably her finest performance, visible especially when she takes over the film's climax." Rai received her seventh Best Actress nomination at Filmfare for her performance in the film. Rai next starred alongside Naveen Andrews and Miranda Richardson in Jag Mundhra's independent British drama "Provoked", as the real-life character of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, a non-resident Indian who murders her husband after suffering years of domestic abuse. Rai earned mostly positive comments for her performance. Critic Indu Mirani from DNA wrote, "Aishwarya Rai plays the battered wife in what is undoubtedly one of her best performances to date. Rai convincingly goes through the various stages of shock, bewilderment, remorse and finally vindication". Internationally well-received, the film emerged as a moderate commercial success in the United Kingdom. That same year, Rai starred alongside Ben Kingsley, Colin Firth and Thomas Sangster as the Indian warrior Mira in Doug Lefler's epic film "The Last Legion".


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Between July to August 2008, Rai, her husband Abhishek Bachchan, her father-in-law Amitabh Bachchan, and actors Preity Zinta, Ritesh Deshmukh and Madhuri Dixit starred in the "Unforgettable World Tour" stage production. The first leg covered the US, Canada, Trinidad, and London, England. Rai is also involved in the functional and administrative operations of her father-in-law's company, originally known as ABCL, and rechristened as AB Corp. Ltd. That company, along with Wizcraft International Entertainment Pvt. Ltd., developed the Unforgettable production.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: After a series of films that under-performed either critically or commercially, Rai garnered both critical and box-office success with Ashutosh Gowariker's period romantic drama "Jodhaa Akbar" (2008). The film narrates a partly fictionalized account of a marriage of convenience between the Mughal emperor Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar (played by Hrithik Roshan) and the Rajput princess Jodha Bai (played by Rai). Rajeev Masand noted, "Rai is wonderfully restrained and uses her eyes expertly to communicate so much, making this one of her finest outings on screen." The film had gross earnings of and fetched Rai a Best Actress nomination at the Filmfare Awards ceremony. She then co-starred with her husband, Abhishek Bachchan, and her father-in-law, Amitabh Bachchan, in Ram Gopal Verma's political drama "Sarkar Raj", a sequel to the 2005 box-office hit "Sarkar". Rai was cast as Anita Rajan, the CEO of an international power firm who proposes to set up a plant in rural Maharashtra. The film was a critical and commercial success, with praise directed to the performances of the three leads.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai's next role was in the 2009 Harald Zwart-directed spy comedy "The Pink Panther 2". Starring alongside Steve Martin, Jean Reno and Emily Mortimer, Rai portrayed the role of Sonia Solandres, a seductive criminology expert. Like its predecessor, the sequel received negative reviews from critics, but did a moderate business of $34 million at the American box office. Roger Ebert wrote, "Rai is breathtaking in Bollywood films, where they devote a great deal of expertise to admiring beauty, but here she's underutilized and too much in the background"; "USA Today" mentioned her expressions as "wooden" and added, "She looks gorgeous, but her expression rarely changes". In 2010, Rai was cast by Mani Ratnam in his Tamil film, which is also a bilingual modern-day adaptation of the Indian epic "Ramayana". Her role was that of Ragini (modeled on Sita, the heroine of "Ramayana"), a woman married to the superintendent of police, who is kidnapped by a bandit. The Tamil version ("Raavanan") and the Hindi version ("Raavan") of the film were shot simultaneously and Rai played the same role in both the film versions. She dubbed for her dialogues in Tamil film "Raavanan" like she did for her earlier Tamil films, "Jeans" and "Kandukondain Kandukondain". She made a comeback to Tamil cinema after a gap of 10 years. The Tamil version "Raavanan" was a huge commercial success, whereas the Hindi version "Raavan" was a commercial failure. The films received polarizing reviews from film critics, as did Rai's performance. Kaveree Bamzai of "India Today" wrote, "Rai's Sita is one of the best things in the film ... her performance is heartfelt—this is a performer who is at ease playing women, rather than girls." However, film critics Aniruddha Guha and Rajeev Masand criticized her character and noted, "She's left to scream and shriek and hiss." Commercially, "Raavanan" emerged as a success, while "Raavan" flopped. Rai's next role was opposite Rajinikanth in the science fiction Tamil film "Enthiran" (2010), directed by S. Shankar. She was cast as Sana, a college student and the girlfriend of Rajinikanth's character. At the time of release, "Enthiran" was the most expensive Indian film production and eventually emerged as one of the highest-grossing Indian films of all time. She then appeared as Mala, an impetuous brat, in Vipul Shah's "Action Replayy"; a science fiction comedy co-starring Akshay Kumar, Aditya Roy Kapoor and Neha Dhupia.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai's final film of 2010 was the drama "Guzaarish"; her third collaboration with director Sanjay Leela Bhansali and actor Hrithik Roshan. The film tells the story of Ethan Mascarenas, a former magician (played by Roshan) with quadriplegia, who after years of struggle, files an appeal for euthanasia. Rai's role was that of Sophia D'Souza, Mascarenas' nurse, who is abused by her alcoholic husband. Due to her and Bhansali's prior associations, Rai agreed to the project before reading its script. Despite flopping at the box office, "Guzaarish" met with positive critical reviews. "The Telegraph" described it to be "one of Rai's best performances" and "The Times of India" summarized, "Rai is a stunning picture of fire and grace, walking away with certain scenes by her sheer vitality." In 2011, Rai was cast as the protagonist of Madhur Bhandarkar's social drama "Heroine"; however, due to her pregnancy, Rai was replaced by actress Kareena Kapoor, the original choice for the role.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: After a five-year sabbatical from film acting, Rai made a comeback with Sanjay Gupta's drama-thriller "Jazbaa", co-starring Shabana Azmi and Irrfan Khan. A remake of the Korean thriller "Seven Days" (2007), the film saw Rai play the role of Anuradha Verma, a criminal lawyer who is forced to defend a rapist in exchange for her daughter's safety. Shubha Shetty-Saha of "Mid-Day" criticized the film's unnecessary and intrusive melodrama and thought that Rai "looks the part and even does a fairly decent job, barring certain emotional scenes where she clearly goes over the top". The film underperformed at the box office. In 2016, Rai starred in Omung Kumar's biographical drama "Sarbjit". The film is based on the life of Indian farmer Sarabjit Singh, who was convicted of terrorism by a Pakistani court, and how his sister Dalbir Kaur fought relentlessly for his release. Rai played the role of the sister of Sarabjit Singh (played by Randeep Hooda). The film premiered at the 69th Cannes Film Festival, and received mixed reactions from critics. Few reviewers expressed that Rai was "miscast" as she neither looked nor sounded like a Sikh woman. Her Punjabi accent and her over-the-top performance in few scenes was largely criticized, though several critics took note of how much she stood out in the film's quieter scenes. Rajeev Masand summarized that "she's required to scream and shout and weep copiously to express her anguish; the shrillness does her no favors. In quieter moments – like one in which Dalbir can't bear to part with her stillborn baby – the actress shines." Nonetheless, her role earned her tenth Filmfare Award for Best Actress nomination. The film earned over worldwide against a production budget of .


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai's final release of 2016 was Karan Johar's musical romantic drama "Ae Dil Hai Mushkil", alongside Anushka Sharma and Ranbir Kapoor, in which she played the role of a poet named Saba. Rai received positive reviews for her performance, despite having limited screen time. Joe Leydon of "Variety" considered her to be the film's prime asset and wrote that she "seems to have wandered in from another movie, one where emotions are conveyed in subtler and more affecting fashion. When she takes her leave from "Ae Dil Hai Mushkil", you may wish you could go with her." The film emerged as one of her biggest commercial successes with revenues of over . Two years later, Rai played the part of a singer who is kidnapped by a troubled father in the unremarkable comedy-drama "Fanney Khan" (2018). An adaptation of the Belgian film "Everybody's Famous!" (2000), the film co-starred Anil Kapoor and Rajkummar Rao. Uday Bhatia of "Mint" disliked the film and found Rai "too unruffled a screen presence to convincingly sell the kind of silliness this film requires".


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In 2022, Rai reunited with Mani Ratnam for "", a Tamil ensemble period film based on Kalki Krishnamurthy's epic novel of the same name. She played Nandini, a scheming Chola queen. Haricharan Pudipeddi of "Hindustan Times" found Rai's to be the best performance among the ensemble cast, while Sonil Dedhia of "News 18" added that she is "wonderfully restrained and uses her eyes expertly to communicate so much". The film earned over worldwide to emerge as one of the highest-grossing Tamil films of all time. Rai will reprise her role in the sequel "Ponniyin Selvan: II".


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In 1999, Rai began dating Bollywood actor Salman Khan; their relationship was often reported in the media until the couple separated in 2002. Rai cited "abuse (verbal, physical and emotional), infidelity and indignity" on the part of Khan as reasons for ending the relationship. She then had a romantic relationship with actor Vivek Oberoi before they broke-up in 2005.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Though they both appeared in "Dhai Akshar Prem Ke" (in which her then longtime boyfriend, Salman Khan, had a brief cameo) and "Kuch Naa Kaho", Abhishek Bachchan fell in love with Rai whilst filming "Dhoom 2". Their engagement was announced on 2007 and later confirmed by his father, Amitabh Bachchan. The couple married on 20 April 2007 according to traditional Hindu rites of the Bunt community, to which she belongs. North Indian and Bengali ceremonies were also performed. The wedding took place in a private ceremony at the Bachchan residence, "Prateeksha", in Juhu, Mumbai. They have been described in the Indian media as a supercouple. Rai is very close to her family, and lived with them in Bandra, Mumbai, until her marriage.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai is Hindu and deeply religious. Her international presence shot up when Abhishek Bachchan accompanied her to the Cannes Film festival shortly after their marriage, and later to "The Oprah Winfrey Show", appearing on 28 September 2009. They were described as being more famous as a couple than Brangelina.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai gave birth to a girl, Aaradhya, on 16 November 2011. Rai is commonly referred to by fans and the media by the nicknames "Ash" and "Aish", but has stated that she dislikes being called as such. She has discouraged people from referring to her by names other than "Aishwarya" as she does not want to "spoil [her] good name".


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: On 12 July 2020, Rai and her daughter were reported to have tested positive for COVID-19. On 17 July, they were reported to have been hospitalized. Rai and her daughter recovered and were discharged from the hospital on 27 July 2020.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai Bachchan is one of the most popular Bollywood celebrities. Despite constant media speculation, she keeps her personal life well-guarded. Her physical appearance and performances have made her a style icon for young women. In 2011, "India Today" noted that there were over 17,000 websites dedicated to her. She was selected by "Verve" magazine in its list of the country's most powerful women. In 2001, "Forbes" named Rai among the top five Indian movie stars. In a reader poll conducted by UK's "Hello!" magazine, she was voted "the most attractive woman of 2003". In the same year, Rai appeared in "Rolling Stone" magazine's annual "Hot List". In 2004, she was chosen by "Time" as one of the world's most influential people, and appeared on the cover of its 2003 Asia edition.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai is the first Indian actress to be on the jury of the Cannes International Film Festival. In October 2004 a wax figure of Rai was put on display in London's Madame Tussaud's wax museum. She was the sixth Indian and the second Bollywood personality—after her father-in-law, Amitabh Bachchan—to get this honour. In 2007, the same figure was displayed at Madame Tussaud's Museum in Times Square in New York. As her most distinctive physical features, Rai's green-blue eyes, luscious lips, curves and feminine mannerisms have been cited by the media as her trademark.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In 2005, she was the subject of a "60 Minutes" profile on , which said that "at least according to thousands of Web sites, Internet polls and even Julia Roberts", she was "the world's most beautiful woman". The same year, a tulip in the Netherlands was named ""Aishwarya Rai"" after her. Also in 2005, Mattel released a limited edition of Barbie dolls of Rai in the United Kingdom. The British magazine "Maxim" ranked Rai first on their list of "Hottest Women of India".


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai appeared on such shows as "Late Show with David Letterman", and was the first Bollywood personality to appear on "Oprah's" "Women Across the Globe" segment. In 2005 Harpers and Queen's list of "Most Beautiful Women in The World" ranked her ninth. In May 2006, Rai was featured in "People Magazine" as one of the "World's Most Beautiful People". The UK magazine "Eastern Eye" ranked her third in the list of "Asia's Sexiest Women" in 2006, and she was ranked eighth in 2009. In 2008, American television channel E!: Entertainment listed Rai's eyes as the sexiest on their Sexiest Body Parts list. In 2009, she made appearances on Martha Stewart's show "Martha" and on "The Tyra Banks Show". In the same year "Forbes" listed Rai at 387th out of 1,411 actors on their list of the most bankable stars in Hollywood. She is the highest-ranked Indian actor on the list.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: In a poll conducted by the newspaper "Daily News and Analysis" in 2009, she was voted as one of India's most popular icons. She attended the 83rd Academy Awards, along with her husband, Abhishek. Rai with her husband Abhishek Bachchan appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" on 28 September 2009. She is the first Indian celebrity who appeared in "The Oprah Winfrey Show" twice. They have been described as a supercouple in the Indian media.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: She ranked 2nd in "The Times of India"s 50 most desirable women of 2010, and ranked 9th for 2011. In 2011, she has received a lot of negative publicity for failing to lose her post-pregnancy weight as is apparently "required" of a public figure. However, she silenced her critics by walking the red carpet at the "AmfAR Cinema Against Aids" gala in 2012 Cannes Film Festival for the 11th time. Later that year, Rai has made it to the issue of "New York Magazine"s list of "Forty Women That Women Find Beautiful", where she grabbed the 21st position in the list, with New York Magazine saying "She may be the "world's most beautiful woman," but what we really love is that she never feels fragile onscreen". The market research firm YouGov named Rai the world's eleventh most admired person of 2018.


title: Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

text: Rai made her first commercial for Camlin exam pencils when she was in the 9th grade. Rai became popular after appearing in a Pepsi commercial with actor Aamir Khan. She is the only actress who endorsed both Pepsi and Coca-Cola. She is one of the top brand ambassadors in the country and is one of the top paid Bollywood actresses in this respect. She modelled for Titan Watches, Longines watches, L'Oréal, Coca-Cola, Lakmé Cosmetics, Casio pager, Philips, Palmolive, Lux, Fuji films, Nakshatra Diamond Jewellery, and Kalyan Jewellers. She was named the official brand ambassador for De Beers diamonds in India. Rai has been ranked the 2nd most popular watch brand ambassador worldwide in a survey, conducted by World Watch Report. In 2013 Rai and her husband Abhishek Bachchan have been roped in as the brand ambassadors by the TTK Group.