Author

If my stories make people uncomfortable, because it questions your set ideas and value systems that are convenient for a group of people or ideas that promote patriarchy and religious fanaticism, then my job as an artiste and a writer is done. The more you will cry foul, the louder my characters will speak.

I will write an entire script but not be commissioned by anyone. I want the freedom to walk away from it. If you're uncomfortable, I will go away. There is no middle ground with me. Also because if I change my character, my story changes.

Ambition alone cannot define a progressive female character.

As a director you have to live and breathe that one story for 8 months completely. I like variety, if I write extensively I get a writer's block so I do something else to beat the boredom and then get back to something I've already done.

You can be imaginative, you have the technology to convert your vision, you have the freedom to write the kind of stories you want to tell beyond the set formulas. Also, you have varied platforms to tell different kinds of stories.

All writers are battling and fighting as to how a woman should be characterised.

Your influence and remuneration is directly proportionate to your film's success. So in that sense, Bollywood is a level playing field. If you are delivering on certain parameters, regardless of your gender, you will get paid.

As a director you have to live and breathe that one story for 8 months completely. I like variety, if I write extensively I get a writer's block so I do something else to beat the boredom and then get back to something I've already done.

I don't think in genres. Once I get a germ of an idea I wait for it to die! And if it refuses to die and keeps coming back, I start thinking more about it. Then come the world and the characters. I wait to get bored and if I don't get bored- then I start building on them.

Telling a story is an emotional and personal experience for me and I can't do without it.

Deep poignant pathos can be described better in dark humour.

There is no greater agony than carrying the burden of an untold story.

Ambition alone cannot define a progressive female character.

Poetry and prose can start a revolution, break walls, and ideas can build nations.

In a film we have limited time and space to say what we have to, hence the visual language and brevity needs to be paramount. In a novel, however, we can dissect each thought and emotion and build on it.

Even if you are a superstar, you have to give your audience some content. Because there is so much good content out there that people consume today. To sustain this, you have to nurture good content and writers.

A novel compared to film writing can allow the author to be more indulgent, and that extends to the characters and the story being told.

Usually superheroes with all their powers and action-driven narratives are supposed to appeal to boys and men more than women; and as an extension of that, it is a given that the creators of these characters are primarily men.

Deep poignant pathos can be described better in dark humour.

I have always aspired to be a writer, be it as an author or a screenwriter, whatever the medium.