I thought my parents were always having card parties - and they were - but they were actually also having meetings to organize people. My older sister would be part of youth organizing, and she'd have dance parties. People would be dancing and talking about how to improve their neighborhood.

My training was with some old British communists who had organized unions in the '60s and '70s. And their philosophy was, if you can't drink a pint with a man, how are you gonna get him to go on strike and risk his life?

For me, the association with rock is one of force and anger and aggression. And definitely, in the past, I've made songs that attack like that. But what I usually try to appeal to is peoples' everyday feelings, the things that they're going through as they deal with the system on a one-to-one level.

Until we can democratically control the wealth that is created from our labor, there isn't real democracy.

People get married when they're 18 and spend their whole lives together. I think their greatest fear is that someone will see it as a fling because they were young and it didn't mean anything.

For my parents' generation, the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love; it was a partnership. It's about creating family; it's about creating offspring. Indian culture is essentially much more of a 'we' culture. It's a communal culture where you do what's best for the community - you procreate.

I think we've all been in relationships - whether they're romantic relationships or not - where there are things that you excuse because you want it to work, because you are hopeful, because you've invested in this relationship, and you might not otherwise let them fly, but you're being optimistic.

My mother, whose interest in chemistry was rather minimal, nevertheless went to graduate school in the subject and married my father, for whom it was as important as life itself.