I was the youngest kid. When I was five, my sisters were 17, 19, and 21, already becoming women. I would see how different they would be around one another and around men, even my father.
If I were involved with the NBA, I wouldn't want a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old kid to bring into all the travel and all the problems that exist in the NBA. I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I've been watching on another team, and now he's 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid.
When I was young, I had two older sisters, and since I was the youngest in my family, my mom took me around with her all the time. I was forever with her when she was having coffee in the middle of the afternoon with her three sisters. And they would talk about men. I absorbed a lot of that.
My father wasn't around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, 'Why me? Why don't I have a father? Why isn't he around? Why did he leave my mother?' But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, 'I don't know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?'
When I was a kid, my parents would play badminton, but I hardly joined them. I'd just pick up their racquets and fiddle around. Check out how the racquet was made... toss it around to see how light it was! At the time, I didn't even know I'd play badminton.
Cyborg was the first superhero that I've ever seen whose parent was around but just was not there for him emotionally, mentally. I related to that in a big way because, growing up, it was my mother and grandmother that raised me and my brother and sisters. I'm the second youngest of five; my father was never in the picture.
I remember being a little kid sitting in the living room with my brother and some friends from around the neighborhood, and I would sit at the piano and as they were running around the room doing different things and being silly, acting out, I would actually play the score for it - the music that went along with it.
People who were also traders were also men of Sufism, as we see around Java, people who were outwardly trading but were also men of very high spiritual character. Otherwise no trader would be able to convert a person from one religion to another. It was because they were men of spiritual character.
I was so much more insecure at 19. Thank God. It would be really cruel if there were a 19-year-old walking around with my confidence.
The last thing the consumer index wants men and women to do is to figure out how to love one another: The $1.5 trillion retail-sales industry depends on sexual estrangement between men and women, and is fueled by sexual dissatisfaction. Ads do not sell sex--that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.
There's an ongoing discussion around equality, and age is one thing that has a very different presence around women than it does around men.
When I was growing up, my father would gather all of his children, seven brothers and seven sisters, around the television set and we would religiously watch every time Notre Dame played.
You'd go to a Pakistani party and the men and women would go in at the front door and the women would go to the right and the men would go to the left, and that was the last that we'd see of them until we were coming home.
In a way, my father [Pablo Escobar] reached a certain degree of sincerity that I became to know and I would even say appreciate because I would have rather had my father treat me like this rather than as an idiot that would never have any idea about what was happening around us.
The men and women of the FBI are deployed around the clock, all over our country and around the world, identifying and disrupting threats, and pursuing those who would do us harm.
I learned respect for womanhood from my father's tender caring for my mother, my sister, and his sisters. Father was the first to arise from dinner to clear the table. My sister and I would wash and dry the dishes each night at Father's request. If we were not there, Father and Mother would clean the kitchen together.
I would love to see women be able to be powerful, complex, smart, opinionated and taken seriously, even if they are beautiful. Even more, I would love to see women held to different standards, other than the superficial ones that we're held to.