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| 1. | Acting school was summer camp, and I needed concentration camp. I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together. |
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| 2. | All India radio was worldwide. |
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| 3. | America is a very vast place compared to other countries. I have a lot of family all over the world, in America, the UK and in India. |
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| 4. | America makes up its own mind about what it wants to see. |
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| 5. | Being an actor has played such an important, intrinsic role in my life. My earliest experiences have either been super organic or really cinematic. |
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| 6. | Having been at the raves and the early hip-hop parties and having gone to the big midwestern rock concerts and traveled to England, music has always been important to me. |
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| 7. | Having practiced the Alexander technique and yoga opens a lot up in you so you don't feel as inhibited. When you find the sound that's exactly perfect for you, you have no choice but to respond in a positive way. |
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| 8. | I always try to get back to that feeling of connected disconnectedness. |
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| 9. | I am a forerunner of a lot of the new cool work because I have had to do the bad roles and the good roles. |
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| 10. | I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in. |
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| 11. | I do think it is important to raise race and culture issues, and most importantly the idea of mental health within those issues. I think theatre and art help us do that. |
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| 12. | I got heavily into the drum-and-bass scene, which is really wicked. |
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| 13. | I had a glorious childhood. Everyone I know who was an Indian person, even if they had it really rough, which a lot of my friends did, is that it is this loneliness. |
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| 14. | I had been working early in my life in films - since I was 11. |
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| 15. | I hear music as narrative. |
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| 16. | I knew I was happy when I was dancing. |
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| 17. | I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far. |
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| 18. | I like to do things that challenge perspectives whether that is in this dimension or not, whether it involves spiritual questions or very practical questions. |
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| 19. | I love films for the fact that it is like working under a microscope. It is sort of like a laboratory. |
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| 20. | I think it important for South Asian American actors to participate in anything that is important to them. I didn't necessarily want to do this just because I am a South Asian American actor. I am an actor. |
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| 21. | I think that I have sold out sometimes. |
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| 22. | I think that rap is narrative, when it's done right. |
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| 23. | I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type. |
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| 24. | I would never pretend to be a writer in the music world, although I would definitely say that I am musical and enjoy storytelling through that modality. |
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| 25. | In every character I play, I try to imbibe something. Every film is a learning process for me. |
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| 26. | It is important to keep your head up and follow what you believe is right. |
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| 27. | It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person. |
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| 28. | It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful. You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe. |
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| 29. | It was a really big deal in the '80s to do an Indian movie from Mira Nair in America. |
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| 30. | It's one thing to do poetry and enjoy the sounds of the words and the alliteration, but it's another to put intention behind words and change the sound of the world by virtue of what you feel. |
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| 31. | Most of my friends make music if not spin it for themselves. |
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| 32. | My body started to change as a result of being around different people. |
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| 33. | My family was very supportive of my acting. They didn't really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything. It paid my way through college and helped my family out. |
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| 34. | My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young. I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part. |
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| 35. | My life in Chicago was brilliant. I was very lucky as a child to be growing up in Evanston in the North side, which was an extremely integrated, very urban and a particularly educated environment. |
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| 36. | My mother is from Kerala so she has a really strong cultural background and she can trace her family back 800 years. |
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| 37. | My parents were both very much in love with the idea of being world citizens and making sure we got around and saw things. |
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| 38. | One of my characters is a taxi cab driver. I have played drivers before. I also play an Iraqi businessman who loves mob movies and a guy who works in porn rentals who is being searched at the airport. |
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| 39. | Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing. Actors are physical, olympian storytellers and we should be able to create entire landscapes with nothing. |
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| 40. | Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well. |
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| 41. | South Asian actors are creating their own work and that will be an enormous push forward in film. |
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| 42. | The Asian Massive world and the acting world, which are two vastly different places, complement each other. |
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| 43. | The camera is interested in what you are thinking as opposed to just what you are doing or saying. |
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| 44. | The formation of words around music is a skill I want to build. I want to be able to ride the vibe the same way a tabla artist or guitarist does it. |
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| 45. | The importance of the socio-political standing of Indians, or South Asians, or Asian people all over the world, is vastly different. |
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| 46. | The loneliness is when you pick up and move, even if you are not originally from that place, and you have some memories that you want to embrace. Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window. |
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| 47. | The turntable is now an instrument at the Smithsonian. |
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| 48. | There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold. |
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| 49. | There is no anti-defamation league for Indian people at this time, but that means someone has to fight to make sure that you are not the butt of a joke. |
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| 50. | There's got to be something greater than us. |
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| 51. | We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects. You can actually figure out before you work on something how much blood you will have to let emotionally. |
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| 52. | When I am listening to house music I am listening to Detroit or Chicago stuff. When I am listening to Indian music I am always trying to find the newest kids. |
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| 53. | When you get to play with the big boys, your game improves drastically. |
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| 54. | You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it. |
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