Aishwarya Rai in "Top 99 Most Desirable Women of 2008" List

Bollywood beauty Aishwarya Rai and sultry Indian actress Mallika Sherawat have been named in the "Top 99 Most Desirable Women of 2008" list of the online AskMen magazine.

Aishwarya at no 27 (last year 40) and Mallika at no 67 (last year 78) are joined by Indian American model and food show host Padma Lakshmi at no 66 (not ranked last year).

Over five million AskMen.com readers cast their votes to identify the females from the worlds of music, fashion, sports, and entertainment who have the characteristics they value in a potential companion, like intelligence, humour, charisma and ambition.

Take a look at Top 30 of these celebrities here.

Richa Gangopadhyay of Northville Township, MI

It was on December 31st, 2007 that I had blogged on Richa Gangopadhyay being crowned the 27th Miss India USA at Royal Albert's Palace in Fords, N.J., on Dec 28th. Since then I have seen practically every other day, Google Alerts in my inbox on Richa Gangopadhya. By now every major Indian Newspapers both in India and overseas has covered Richa.

And yesterday I get a email from Rajiv Sanghvi (organizer of Festival of India) that Richa had won Miss India USA. The other piece of information which Rajiv passed on to me which I was not aware of was that Richa was crowned Miss India-Michigan last August at the Festival of India in Downtown Detroit at Hart Plaza which qualified her for the Miss. India-USA pageant to represent Michigan.

Once again congratulations and best wishes to Richa!!. Adjacent image of Richa courtesy of Observer and Eccentric Newspapers