Orissa was full of leprosy patients then, "and that health home still exists today and was the earliest inspiration that I have - that talk is cheap and action is what really matters," Nair added. "So I grew up when she gave me the confidence to believe anything was possible."
What brought her to America was yet another audacious thought for this pagli. She had gone to see the Hollywood film Love Story directed by Arthur Penn at the Plaza cinema in New Delhi. "I saw Ryan O'Neal cavorting about Ali MacGraw in the snow field in Harvard," she said chuckling. "And I thought that looks like the place that has enough money to give me a full scholarship to come all the way from India. And lo and behold -- they gave me a scholarship when I came here for the first time at the age of 19 to come to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I saw snow for the first time pretty much like Ashima in The Namesake.
"But," she continued, "it was that foolish confidence my mother had given me, India had given me, that I could believe that anything was possible. And I employed this confidence early on to make films, to make films of what I believed in to honour the handmaid, to hone this great craft -- which is film -- which really is a popular and deeply powerful medium."
Image: Mira Nair with PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, last year's winner.
Also read: The man who gave us SRK, Mira Nair & Pankaj Kapoor
