My mother praised me when I did something good, and then the next moment, she would say, 'Don't float.' She put me in a balloon and then pricked it.

The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.

Our entire family is replete with sentiments of patriotism. Uncle Swarna Singh left for his heavenly abode in jail in 1910, two or three years after my birth. Uncle Ajit Singh is leading the life of an exile in foreign countries.

Before I was married to Martin and became a King, I was a proud Scott, shaped by my mother's discernment and my father's strength.

I love every minute of fatherhood, staying up all night, changing nappies, kids crying, I find it really funny and inspiring. It connects you to the world in a new way.

Instruction, and advice, and commands will profit little, unless they are backed up by the pattern of your own life. Your children will never believe you are in earnest, and really wish them to obey you, so long as your actions contradict your counsel... Think not your children will practise what they do not see you do. You are their model picture, and they will copy what you are... will seldom learn habits which they see you despise, or walk in paths in which you do not walk yourself.