Quotes from Padmapriya Janakiraman

My parents live in Hyderabad and I visit the city often.

I have acted in 20 films in various languages and won 13 awards for my acting skills.

I don't do movies for the awards. The awards are made for the films. The films are not made for the awards.

Our lives are better when we make the right choices through a heightened awareness of the world around us.

When you live with a character in your mind, after a while you start to behave like them, act like them and connect with them. That is how acting happens for me.

Cinema is a male-dominated bastion and one has to be patient.

Changing age old patriarchal mindsets is a difficult long process and involves constant communication and dialogue.

In a crazy, high-pressure environment like a film set, eventually a peculiar kind of empathy develops for your co-workers.

Item numbers are a different ball game altogether. I feel no one in Mollywood has the guts or skill to film an item song, without making it look vulgar, as Amal Neerad can.

Anger, pain and a tinge of joy are the recursive emotions I have been waking up to ever since I read reports on how Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed women in Hollywood for years. Some of these women are actors I have been longing to co-star with even if they reside in another part of the globe.

I'm excited to work in Bollywood, but I want to be part of meaningful projects.

I have not tried enough to be in Bollywood.

Some years you have more work and some years less. That does not bother me. What matters is the end product.

When you see the phase of 60s and 70s, the craze for Dev Anand and actors of that era, it still exists in south. The craze is huge but that's also for stars like Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan and Mohanlal, especially for male stars.

I'm greedy for good films, and will test waters in new territories as long as I get to satiate that greed.

However vain our entire political class or organizations are, in the name of cynicism we cannot bend towards authoritarian populism.

I think classical dance is not seeing the evolution seen by classical music.

The only philosophy that I'm not confused about in life is love.

The Hegelian dynamic plays out daily on and off the film sets - women are not lesser beings, but because they are assumed to be, they are subjected to inferior conditions. And this inferiority projects itself through the feeling of weakness and subjugation.

It has been a fairy tale for an outsider, bouncing from one film set to another, choosing my films as assertively as those films chose me. And through this journey I have not once faced the dreaded syndrome of the 'casting couch.'

The Weinstein story and the way it has shaken the roots of Hollywood has made apparent the fact that, across the world, there is a pressing need to recognize and correct the circumstances women subsist in, in order to move forward.

If I am offered a character that demands me to go bald, I would definitely give it a thought. I love my hair, but if the script is that brilliant I would take up such roles.

I am never disappointed in life in not getting any awards: it is the movies which keep me going, not the awards.

I would like to be part of all kind of cinema and will jump at any opportunity that allows me to experiment as an actor.