As a creative agency, the film industry is thinking great subjects, presenting them wonderfully well, and giving opportunity to new faces each day.
I am insecure about tomorrow. Will I get another job? Will it be appreciated? I will pursue acting for as long as I have a face and body that is acceptable to the people, but I still worry that if I don't do better tomorrow, it will all go away.
Everybody wants to live. But sometimes the body just gives up.
Whatever free time I get, I love to catch news and sports shows.
I like to feel the butterflies in the stomach, I like to go home and have a restless night and wonder how I'm going to be able to accomplish this feat, get jittery. That hunger and those butterflies in the stomach are very essential for all creative people.
The film industry is large enough and has many successful icons that have taken Indian cinema to shores beyond India. I think that Indian cinema itself needs to be applauded beyond one individual.
If the modes are changing, one goes along with it, I guess.
Frankly I've never really subscribed to these adjectives tagging me as an 'icon', 'superstar', etc. I've always thought of myself as an actor doing his job to the best of his ability.
I think that it's important that actors keep getting challenged every day. For every creative person, it's a terrible moment when they say they have done all they want to do.
I guess I've been extremely keen on theatre, on getting on to the stage, taking on different roles, enacting vocations, personalities, people, situations, and I guess that's the interest that has driven me to work in movies.
I would rather talk to a face than a camera.
I think, in any profession, what you fear most is not being able to perform, about not being able to meet new challenges. The fear of non-acceptance, particularly if in creative art. What happens if the audiences do not like you anymore!
You don't see Indians in Hollywood films around which a story can revolve. As soon as we have a social presence in your society, I am sure there will be many actors from our part of the world that will be acting in Hollywood films.
I sign a film based on the story, the role I play, and the maker.
Please explain to me what being an icon is. How do you define it? I haven't been given a script. I don't know what the dialogues of an icon are.
I'm very lucky and very fortunate to have survived and to still be working after 45 years.
I like to rate myself as a performer upfront, both in films as well as in television.
I'm very thankful to directors and filmmakers who consider me in their films, and I hope I'm able to do justice to their films.
I would like to believe that I still am a shy person; I am very introverted. I have a problem communicating.
I write my own blog every day. I do the Twitter every day and the Facebook. Without a gap. I do everything myself: I load my own photographs; I sometimes take my own videos and post them.
I don't know how others think about me, but if I have to walk the streets, I will, and if I need to stand in a queue at the airport, that's OK.
I am not in the least eloquent or fluent with languages. My writing on social media is quite pedestrian. But even if it was near any acceptability, I would not be in a position to pen a script or a book.
People ask me why it is that when I portray the 'angry young man' on screen, I really look angry. They reason that it is due to some suppression in my childhood. But, it's just that I can't help it; it's in my genes.
I don't have anything in particular to achieve; I don't want to go any particular direction. I just want to take up the challenges of life as we go along.
I am looking forward to going to Dubai because it gives us an opportunity to interact with each other. We can sit and enjoy each other's company. We can go out for a walk without worrying about shooting schedules.
I think 'Crouching Tiger' is a genre of its own, and it's extremely well done, and God bless them for it.
A lot of my fighting qualities I inherited from my parents. They set tremendous examples right through my life.
If you represent a fantasy for the people who actually go to the cinema, they grab that and go with it; therefore, for the rest of their lives, they actually identify you with a certain thinking - a certain philosophy. There are many actors who want to pursue that same thought in real life as well, and that's perfectly acceptable.
Obviously, you look for something that is commensurate with your age. You know that you can't be playing the young hero anymore, and you have to be relegated to something smaller and something elderly, and you just try and do your best.
I'd love to romance Aishwarya Rai. But I'm 58 now. So I have to play her father.
The select group of people who do make realistic cinema, who do make cinema perhaps a little more acceptable to the Western audience, is a very small percentage.
The amount of things I have been through and the remarkable ways in which the body has reacted is just phenomenal. No wonder I became religious, because you don't know why something's happening to you and you don't know how you bounced back.
Dearest TV media and vans outside my home, please do not stress and work so hard.
We must have song and dance in our lives; we've had it ever since the inception of cinema in India. Our stories are very social-based, very human-based. We are a very emotional nation.
I should only look back at moments that were disparaging, look down upon, negative for me - moments where I could learn something. And if I have been able to use that learning in future, then I am happy about it.
I don't spend much time looking back at what happened. I do remember it, but I don't see any purpose of wanting to look back.
Everyone must accept that we will age and age is not always flattering.
There are large numbers of people in India below the poverty line; there are large numbers of people who lead a meager existence. They want to find a little escape from the hardships of life and come and watch something colorful and exciting and musical. Indian cinema provides that.
I ask you, as a citizen, is it a crime to go to the temple? And if I am propagating superstition by going to the temple, then the whole country is propagating superstition.
My father is a poet. He's a literary giant of this country - writes in Hindi - and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.
I'd like to believe that tomorrow is another challenge for me. I'm sure there is lots more for me to do, because there is lots and lots of stuff still to be explored.
I miss the camera each moment and each day.
I feel a burden if I don't write.
There are many things that I feel I have missed out on.
My opening words to anybody I hire are, 'I'm an extremely vulnerable person.'
Audiences change because life changes. Countries change geographically, climatically, socially and morally. Many things happen, and cinema, in a sense, reflects what's happening in the world.
'What will people say?' is a feeling every Indian girl grows up with.
Indian films are like our food or our sense of dress or our languages: there's a great variety, and it changes every 100 miles, but there is something in common, a national Indian essence, that binds them all together.
'No' is an entire sentence in itself. No means no, and when somebody says it, you need to stop.
