Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing.
In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.
The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be booted out; not any particular manifestation of that principle.
Of course you cannot compare my Hindi with a Hindi-speaking person, but I am confident enough to hold a conversation in mixed Hindi-English.
When I see my work in a gallery I often wonder how I got to this point. Sometimes the process of making the work feels like a blur, and I look at the work and wonder how I actually made it.
Dubbing for myself in Hindi is a big task. I know Hindi. I can read and write Hindi, but I dont normally speak the language, and that is very important.
I'm not a television anchor for a Hindi channel or a radio jockey. So I may not be able to have a spontaneous conversation in Hindi. I'm a Bollywood actress, and I can certainly speak my dialogue in Hindi.
I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too.
If you become too sceptical, you become scientists. If you become too childlike, you become religious. Science exists with doubt. Religion exists with wonder. If you want to be religious then create more wonder, discover more wonder. Allow your eyes to be more filled with wonder than anything else. Be surprised by everything that is happening. Everything is so tremendously wonderful that it is simply unbelievable how you go on living without dancing, how you go on living without becoming ecstatic. You must not be seeing what is happening all around.
One day Mani Sir called me to his office and narrated the script of 'Raavan.' He then asked me how good my Hindi is. When I told him that it's quite good, he asked one of his assistant directors to talk to me in Hindi and I was asked only to reply in Hindi.
Now I know Hindi, and I can read and write Hindi, but the problem is that I can't improvise when I am acting because I think in English, so I have to translate my thinking from English to Hindi, and therefore, I speak slowly.
The mind God is looking for in man is a doubting, questioning mind, not a dogmatic mind; dogmatic reasoning is wrong reasoning. Dogmatic reason ties a huge rock to a man's foot and stops him forever from advancing.
For 'Dum Maro Dum,' I had a diction tutor, as I had to get rid of my Hyderabadi Hindi and learn Goan Hindi. It wasn't easy, because these two kinds of Hindi were mutually incompatible. I had to unlearn one kind of Hindi and then learn a new kind.
Until we got married, Radha didn't utter a word of English and now she won't speak Hindi. Her Hindi's pretty good actually - she learnt it while watching Hindi movies.
Of course there are regrets. I shall regret always that I found my own authentic voice in politics. I was too conservative, too conventional. Too safe, too often. Too defensive. Too reactive. Later, too often on the back foot.
I like doing Marathi films. I am not too keen on Hindi TV shows. It's very tough to get Hindi films, but if a good script and role comes up in future, I will surely pick it up.