I did an internship with Dove when they were doing the 'real beauty' campaign, and I was really inspired by that. Growing up in L.A., being a young woman, and seeing how the media tells young women to be everything you're not, I kind of wrote about that experience.

I talk to my mom about six times a day, and we constantly email in between that. People say that I'm her twin. I guess it would be the Kennedy genes; my cheekbones are coming out.

When I was younger, I played sports and went to camp. As I got older, my parents began to instill in us the importance of giving back to the community, especially those places around the world that are less fortunate than my very privileged life growing up in Los Angeles.

Women's bodies are meant to store fat so that we can do amazing things like have babies or rock a tight pair of jeans.

On the evidence I have on hand at home, social media isn't killing our children. It isn't killing families, either, because the constant long bloody phone calls that parents complained to their teenagers about in decades past are gone.

From my foster parents, the Deans, I received the love that was ultimately to strengthen me, even when I had forgotten its source. It was my foster mother, a half-Indian, half-German woman, who taught me to read, though she herself was barely literate. I remember her reading to me every day from 'True Romance' magazine.

Since the conception of our country, America has held that parents, not schools, teachers, and certainly not courts, hold the primary responsibility of educating their children.

I come from an everyday middle class family in India. The film industry reached us only through our television sets and cinema halls.