After spending 460 days as a hostage, I did emerge a fundamentally changed person. But I think, like everyone does as they grow older and probably wiser, I can look back at my earlier life - my history, my mistakes, the joy I felt as a young woman traveling the world - with some objectivity and even some humor.
The men and women of our emergency services are the very best of us.
Honestly, I get character ideas from the most inane places. Sometimes a song will give me an idea. Sometimes I will just hear a snippet of conversation that ends up having nothing to do with the book that emerges.
Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.
In Modiji, we have given India a 'mazboot' leader under whom India has emerged among the top economies.
You don't get time to meet your peers such as Dharmendra and Hema Malini very often. Award functions or other events are the only places you meet them, unless there is an emergency. Then we all come together.
I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
Iraq can emerge as a beacon of hope and democracy in the Middle East, and the world, with our help.
Having said that, I believe we must not compound the natural disaster of Katrina by creating a fiscal disaster in Congress - it is our duty to ensure that we reign in other government spending in any event, and especially in this time of national emergency.
Anytime a large, emergency spending bill makes its way through Congress, the potential for mischief is great.
