I'm encouraged because you pick up any food magazine and there's two or three recipes involving Indian spices.
I think there is a real misconception about Indian food being super spicy. And I know that's because when you go into an Indian restaurant, it is pretty spicy. But it doesn't have to be. In fact, my husband can't handle a lot of heat. I've had to temper my cooking so that he can eat with me.
I was born in Mumbai, but I grew up in England, and then my adulthood has been in the States. I'm an American stuffed with an English person with an Indian person inside. I feel like those things kind of inform me in some way, which I think helps me as an actor.
I'm free to see things objectively because I don't consider myself American, and I don't consider myself British or Indian. I'm kind of an amalgam or mongrel of a lot of different places and experiences. In a lot of ways it's been a good thing for me. It's enabled me to do what I do on 'The Daily Show.'
That's the Indian in me - you must put spices on everything. As a kid, whenever we got sick, my mom would take milk and put turmeric in it. That was our medicine. That was the cure-all. Some people turn to Robitussin.
The average Indian doesn't care about Hollywood movies because they have far too many movies of their own to watch, to miss, and I hope a story like 'Million Dollar Arm,' that is actually about India and deals with these two Indian kids, resonates over there and makes people want to go and see the movie.
For my parents' generation, the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love; it was a partnership. It's about creating family; it's about creating offspring. Indian culture is essentially much more of a 'we' culture. It's a communal culture where you do what's best for the community - you procreate.
In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food... they've never even tasted it!
When you're brown and Indian, you get offered a lot of doctor roles.
When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.
