I had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing and went to boarding school when I was five.
Like every other teenage girl, I was a great fan of Hrithik sir. This childhood crush was not like others though – the love for him was so deep in my heart that my boarding school hostel room was filled with his posters which I didn’t let any one touch. My heart was broken when I saw him getting married.
I went to an all-girls boarding school in Maryland. I used to laugh at the girls in the theater program – I was pre-med, National Honors Society; I was on that track.
At this point I was strongly advised that I was too young socially to go to college so I took a second senior year at Andover, another boarding school.
I wanted to be a great white hunter, a prospector for gold, or a slave trader. But then, when I was eight, my parents sent me to a boarding school in South Africa. It was the equivalent of a British public school with cold showers, beatings and rotten food. But what it also had was a library full of books.
I have a theory that if you’ve got the kind of parents who want to send you to boarding school, you’re probably better off at boarding school.
I spent a lot of time in boarding school. This is something I will never do to my kids. I think if you’re having kids, then you have to take care of them; otherwise, what’s the point? There are many things that parents say are good for the kids, but the truth is they say that because it is good for the parents.
I ran away from three different boarding schools before joining a circus school, and eventually I became an actor. The only thing I learned at boarding school was never to send my child to one.
I spent half my life in a boarding school where we were shown only the sporadic wholesome classic like ‘The Sound Of Music.’ So, I am not familiar with most of the works of the acting greats in Bollywood, Hollywood, or Tamil-Telugu cinema.
I remember joining a boarding school in the sixth grade. I was lazy, complacent, and fat. Suddenly, I realised that I had to fend for myself. That’s when I discovered this drive within myself. For the first time, I ranked first in class, which was a miracle in itself. However, it didn’t matter to my family.
The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love fashion. As a child, I was always particular about what I’d wear. I remember feeling most aggrieved that I had to put on a dull uniform to go to boarding school.
In my junior year of high school, I went to a boarding school for the arts: a school called the Governor’s School for The Arts and Humanities. It was basically a mini-Juilliard – an intense training conservatory for the arts.
I went to a boarding school when I was 13, and it was a very arty school, so there was an opportunity for a lot more. I joined a band and so on. We would do concerts at school, and I would play cover tunes and thought, ‘This is really great.’
The first ‘Polly and the Pirates’ is about a prim and proper girl who gets kidnapped out of her comfy boarding school by a bunch of pirates that think she’s the daughter of their long lost queen. In the course of the adventure, she discovers she has a natural penchant for swashbuckling, despite her sheltered childhood.
I never have issues in handling the fame. I was in a boarding school, as I am from a middle-class family. We didn’t have a lot of money, so we all learned to respect money and understood its real value.
When I was 13, I won a scholarship to boarding school. My parents let me choose whether to go, and I decided I wanted to. Afterwards, I went to Cambridge to study law – in a way, I was carrying the academic hopes of my family, as Mum and Dad left school at 14.
I used to always look forward to my school summer holidays where Saba and I would go and meet bhai. It was exciting spending those two months with him. I always thought he was cool, with his long hair. We would watch him play cricket at his boarding school. He would take us out for dinner with his friends. Exciting times for a kid!
I have been a frequent air traveler since I was a few months shy of my sixth birthday, when my parents packed me off to boarding school two plane rides away from home. Those days of being willingly handed from air hostess to air hostess as an ‘unaccompanied minor’ made me blase about the rigors of air travel.
I spent my entire childhood in the same town, in Kent. I went to grade school there. There was a boarding school that my mother taught at, called – appropriately enough – Kent School, that I went to. Yeah, pretty much my entire childhood was spent in that town.
I was born in Dallas; then I moved to Allen, Texas. But then I got sent to boarding school, where I started to get fascinated with actors like Al Pacino.
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