I wasn't a friendly child. I was reserved and mostly kept to myself. My family tells me they've noticed a sea change in me after I've grown up. But I guess that's natural. Your surroundings, friends, college, etc. do make a lot of difference to your personality.
I played Nina in 'The Seagull,' and I remember thinking it's incredible to see all the actresses in the past that've played her. It's quite strengthening. You feel a part of the family of actresses going through and giving something of themselves to the role.
My family and I are hooked on 'The Searchers.' I can't get enough of it.
I'm not a big chicken or meat eater, but sometimes I'll eat it if it's locally raised. The family dinner will be stir-fry, or we'll roll our own sushi with brown rice, spinach, salmon, sesame oil, sesame seeds, and seaweed. The kids love it!
I love kids, and I love having had this second chance to have a family.
Unlike most youngsters who have school as their 'second home' where they meet and make friends, for me playtime has been at the Gopichand Badminton Academy in Hyderabad. When I am not playing a tournament, my days are spent at the Academy with my coaches, physiotherapists and colleagues, who are like family. We laugh and have so much fun.
There is a standard joke in the family. Probably we should go into selling second-hand shoes.
My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.
The difference between our family and other poor families was that my mother actively chose to be poor. She was highly literate, and she had a college degree, but after my father left, she took the first secretarial job she could find and never looked for other employment again.
I hate to say that my mother was 'just a housewife', because in addition to that she has had lots of part-time secretarial jobs in factories and hospitals, always working really hard for our family.
Growing up, it was uncool to admit that your family had any money. And then, instantly, money was cool. In Reagan's parlance, it was about freedom of the individual, which was freedom to be greedy... individual versus society. There was a weird seduction in that, which I still feel.
I'm more selective now I've got a family. I don't want to work all the time. My daughter's 12; I don't want to miss out on her life. Soon she'll be a teenager; she won't want me around.
Self-censorship has become a part of me. I think because we live in a place where community is very important, family is very important, you feel the weight of how people look at you. Even though I might seem very modern and very liberated, I still have a lot of issues to deal with. I'm scared of how people look at me.
In personal life, the warm glow of nostalgia amplifies good memories and minimizes bad ones about experiences and relationships, encouraging us to revisit and renew our ties with friends and family. It always involves a little harmless self-deception, like forgetting the pain of childbirth.
Some of my friends and family have tried to challenge me to do jokes that aren't as self-deprecating, where I genuinely express my own opinion in my own voice.
As wonderful as they were, my parents didn't teach me anything about self-discipline, concentration, patience, or focus. If I hadn't had a family myself, I probably never would've done anything. Marriage taught me responsibility.
Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.
That might be completely self-indulgent, to write your first major-label debut as a dedication to your family. But, you know, that's where my heart was.
A job should bring enough for a worker and family to live on, but after that, self-realization, the exercise of one's gifts and talents, is what truly matters.
Humility was considered a great virtue in my family household. No show of complacency or self-satisfaction was ever tolerated. Patting yourself on the back was definitely not encouraged, and pleasure or pride would be punishable by death.
