My mother celebrated every Hindu festival with the appropriate rituals, but no one acknowledged birthdays. My parents never hugged us, kissed us, or said, "I love you.". Love was assumed. We never shared fears or hopes and dreams with our elders. They just were not the kind to have those conversations.

Children have the right to grow up in a family with a father and mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child's development and emotional maturity. Today marriage and the family are in crisis. We now live in a culture of the temporary, in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment.

I'm a strange mixture of my mother's curiosity; my father, who grew up the son of the manse in a Presbyterian family, who had a tremendous sense of duty and responsibility; and my mother's father, who was always in trouble with gambling debts.

Black and brown pride have been taught in my household for a long time.

Everyone carries within himself an image of womanliness derived from his mother: it is this that determines whether, on the whole, he will revere women, or despise them, or remain generally indifferent to them.

I'm 23 years old. I might just be my mother's child, but in all reality, I'm everybody's child. Nobody raised me; I was raised in this society.