I ate Bengali food after my parents married and Dad started living with us, in both Willesden and in Delhi for three years, and then we all moved to California. Dad said he could make a really good dal, but I never saw him cook during the whole time we lived together.
My mother is half Malayali and half Tamilian. I can speak Bengali and Tamil, but can't read or write.
In Bengali films, since I also write the lyrics, there are certain songs, which I get emotionally and personally attached to.
I am songwriter. I do compose the music of songs that I write in Bengali. But I've never thought of composing for a film. That's a different art altogether.
I like to read Bengali novels and short stories. I am not that fond of reading English books, as I don't have a connect with it.
I love to cook, and both Pancham and Gulzarbhai loved to eat. Gulzarbhai loves my karela ghosht and my Bengali kheer.
Monica Besra, a Bengali woman from a remote Indian village, was reportedly suffering from a malignant ovarian tumor when she went, in 1998, to a hospice founded by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. Nuns at the mission reportedly placed a medallion with Teresa's image on Besra's abdomen, and the tumor disappeared.
I feel I can express the nuances of the Bengali lifestyle and ways of thinking better than other cultures.
I was about 12 when I first encountered 'The Moonstone' - or a Classics Illustrated version of it - digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon.
We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.'
