If you asked anybody in my family, they would have very stridently proclaimed themselves middle class. My mother and father were separated, so he doesn't count.

I come from a wonderful family. My mother was a pianist and my father was a salesman. They were very middle-class, very middle-Western.

I came from Nebraska, a very middle class family with a progressive father.

When I go to upper-caste, middle-class homes, the father and mother would be complaining: 'The child is not studying, he's watching TV. When I go to slums to meet my relatives, they don't have that kind of problem. You will see that the light is not there; there is a gutter flowing nearby. But the child is sitting there in whatever room has electricity, and he is studying. He doesn't need motivation.

Well, I was about six or seven, and my mother and father separated.

My father and my mother separated when I was two.