‘I would put Shah Rukh Khan in a situation in which he was the underdog...vulnerable’

Is that right? Is that good?

That's funny.

• Well, wonderful to have you in Delhi, the Padma Shri is on now, so congratulations.

I'm so excited to be here. I can't believe that we are here. I kind of came in and was made aware of the award just a month ago. And I decided to come and, here we are. It's an amazing thing.

• In India Gate.

I know. Actually, I've been to India some eight-nine times since I was a little kid but we always went to the south, you know, to visit the aunts and the uncles and the grandma and grandpa and all that stuff.

• I believe uncles and aunts and cousins and siblings -- all PhDs and MDs.

Yeah, I'm the black sheep of the family.

• How did you get dropped out?

I'm the disgrace to the family, the least educated one of the family.

•But you make as much money as the rest of them (laugh) and (have) a lot more fame. But what happened? What made you go the other way?

Well, it wasn't something that I thought about -- not doing medicine. You know, all my family is in medicine, but it was a slow thing, realising that the thing I was doing for fun as a little kid, making movies with my dad's camera, is something that you can go to school for. It wasn't something that -- I mean, now you can go to school for film school and it seems more normal, but back then it wasn't -- it isn't something you could learn to do as a career. And I heard about this school in New York, that it's a film school, and I told my parents, 'Hey, I want to go to film school.'

•But a camera, a movie camera at the age of eight? How did that happen?

I guess that's weird enough in itself. But you know at the...