My mother was a very good violinist; my father was a musicologist and spent most of his life in academia.
Of all the memories I have of my father and of our relationship, none is warmer and more poignant than what happened a year before he died, when he came to visit me while I was teaching at West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver.
God bless my father, but he always spoke in this continental, literary accent, probably because he was a professor of comparative literature and he made the decision to speak with distinction.
I wanted to write something in a voice that was unique to who I was. And I wanted something that was accessible to the person who works at Dunkin Donuts or who drives a bus, someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father, someone who's busy and has too many children, like my mother.
We've got so many different cultural groups in my family that I've had to learn to accommodate them in different ways. My father speaks different to my mum. My mum speaks different to my grandmother. Everybody speaks different, so you find you start tweaking your language to be more accessible to people.
I'm a typical Delhi girl. Professional parents, nuclear family. My father was in the navy. I've spent my whole life in government accommodation, and it's been lovely.
On one occasion, I accompanied my father to Pinares de Mayari. I was eight or nine years old. How he enjoyed talking when he left the house in Biran! There he was the proprietor of the land where sugar cane, pasture, and other agricultural crops were planted.
My father is conservative but has always supported my decisions. He lets me take my own decisions. His only condition while allowing me to come to Mumbai was that my mother must accompany me.
My family is extremely supportive of me. My mother has been accompanying me to the shoots, and my father used to drive me around for auditions.
My father used to say that it's never too late to do anything you wanted to do. And he said, 'You never know what you can accomplish until you try.'
Jesus was loyal to his apostles, with full knowledge of their cowardice. He was loyal to the poor, accepting the criticism of the Pharisees, so the destitute would never feel deserted. He was loyal to his father, accomplishing his will even unto death.
My father firmly embraced the Ralph Kramden philosophy: he was king of his Levittown castle. He worked hard, and his family deferred to his wishes. Except me. I did not defer and was disciplined accordingly.
My father bought me a little cardboard accordion, and when I was three I got this little machine.
My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
My father saw that there is no way we can stay in the G-20 and grow with this level of corruption. In early 2015, one of his first orders to his team was to collect all the information about corruption - at the top. This team worked for two years until they collected the most accurate information, and then they came up with about 200 names.
When a father puts in long hours at work, he's praised for being dedicated and ambitious. But when a mother stays late at the office, she's sometimes accused of being selfish, neglecting her kids.
My father Ted fought in North Africa, Italy, and Germany during World War II. My grandfather survived the horrors of the trenches in World War I. I truly believe that one of the E.U.'s greatest achievements is that it has kept its members out of conflict in Europe.
I remember, as a child, a particular groan that my father would sound when he crawled from the bed in the morning. I hear the same groan now, precisely, every morning, when I emerge from my own lair. It's more than an expression of physical weariness - it's an aching of the soul. Even the groans get passed down.
From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.
My father's in the military, so we moved a lot. I was born in Jersey but grew up in Maryland until we moved to L.A. to pursue my acting career. Music came into it after that.
