One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts... to my surprise... almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.
My kids miss me when I'm away, but I don't mind living out of a suitcase. The U.K., U.S., France, Germany, Iraq... it's such a thrill meeting people of different cultures, learning about and from them. It's changed my perception about life, humanity and spirituality.
In our world of sleek flesh and collagen, Botox and liposuction, what we most fear is the dissolution of the body-mind, the death of the brain.
I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what's going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.
I feel that, in India, we have films that have tackled various issues over the years, but perhaps one of the issues that we've tackled less is the issue of caste-ism. That's an issue we've more or less stayed away from... although we touched on it briefly in some films like 'Lagaan.'
I don't see myself as an activist. I understand that people, with me doing 'Satyameva Jayate,' for example, they will feel that I'm being an activist, but I'm not. Actually, I'm not, because I think an activist, as I see it, as a person who is very, very - takes up one issue and remains with that one issue for his entire life. I'm not doing that.
I do miss 'Battlestar', the cast and crew. That was a pretty well-oiled machine. It's sort of like you don't know what you've got till it's gone. But I go to a lot of sci-fi conventions, and I love going and talking about the show.