I'm thrilled to join you and thank you so much for having me.

Effectively, Think Equal because that rose up from the mass of competencies and skills, tenets and precepts and values systems, primary belief systems that we examined early on, in terms of what is the core, the fundamental, most important one. Now, one could argue it's empathy, that empathy is the glue that sticks everything else together. But at the end of the day, if you drill right down, if I consider myself to be of absolute equal and equivalent value to every single other human being, if I truly think equal, then I do empathize with others. Then I am inclusive. Then I do practice. It's second nature to me. Gender equality, racial equality, religious equality. I have fundamental respect. There is an African philosophy called ubuntu, that is the very basis of Think Equal, that is our primary belief system, that you are the other me and I am the other you, and we can only be human together. We are one human family.

Unfortunately, increasingly over the decades and centuries, and we seem to be getting worse every year, we continue to divide amongst us. That is the basis of this slalom ride to catastrophe that I feel we're on. Think Equal is trying to disrupt that, to stop that, to end the violence, end the discrimination, end what we perceive as one of the biggest problems we have, which is the according of lesser or no value to another human being when compared to us. Now, it's a long answer to a very simple question. That is why Think Equal.

Why 3 to 6? Because, it is an absolute neuroscientific fact, that if you want to put a foundation, a second nature reflexive habit of mind that embraces the 25 competencies and skills that we have ended up with, that we know we want to teach and nurture human beings with, you've got to go in before the age of 6. Before 3, critically important years, but we can't really go in and teach various things like self-esteem, gender equality, environmental stewardship, critical thinking, peaceful conflict resolution, problem solving, all these things we do teach. We can't really go in before 3, because number one, on a practical level, we have to be realistic. We're not going to be welcome in people's homes. Especially homes that are holding on to and fomenting discrimination generationally and cyclically from parent to child, right? They're not going to want us to make their child empathetic, kind, loving and inclusive. They're happy for them to be that, as long as it's not applied to that group.

Number 2, just on a developmental level, there are certain things the child below 3 is not yet capable of. The identity is only forming at 3. So, the optimal years for what we want to do, which is essentially help children develop while their brain is being built, 90% of the adult brain is fully built by the age of 5, we want to co-construct with children, pro-social neural pathways in their developing brain so that that is who they are. Prosocial, loving, equal, inclusive, empathetic human beings. That is what we are about.

Oh for sure. As you know, in the African continent we're making huge progress. I don't think it's a coincidence, they're getting it much more than the so-called developed countries, who are nowhere as far as understanding and realization, or certainly not, far enough yet that early childhood, early years and the concept of Ubuntu, DEI is becoming something of a buzzword now. Diversity, inclusion, equality, it's starting to grow. But Africa understands it I think really fundamentally, because it is part of its philosophy and primary belief system.

Yes. It's a factor of cynicism and I think that human beings, the adults of course, I'm talking about have become, and possibly and I'm going to be very challenging here, but it is true that it is men who have architected our world and who run it still. I am such a fervent believer in the fact that the time has come for women to lead. It's not because we're inherently better, it's because we've been programmed just as men have, we're all programmed, part of what Think Equal is doing is recognizing that and saying, 'we need to reprogram for good as opposed to for greed, selfishness, indifference and putting wealth above human beings. A power play which leads to war, etc.'

I mean women are programmed to nurture, women would not be putting their sons and daughters in some countries into the firing line. They just wouldn't. Men have somehow been programmed to sacrifice, and this kind of cynical power play, I think, is very much responsible for finding out, creating these fault lines, actually questioning truth, making sure that there are algorithms that can seek you out. It's one of the most upsetting counterproductive, terrible ways in which we're reversing any sense of progress. I'm very fond of quoting an HG Wells quote because I think about it all the time, and I find it to be so laser sharp in its accuracy and applicability.

H.G. Wells said "Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe". How true is that for the world we're living through now? But the question is, what education? What is education? What kind of education? For me, the last 8 years of my life have been entirely bent on that question. It's a question, which was born in Tihar jail in Delhi, in the prison cells, in which I was interviewing rapists and murderers for 31 hours over several weeks. It's a question which has been the most fundamental and pressing question for me, which has led me to create Think Equal, which has actually led me to abandon my former métier, my great love of filmmaking. I was a very happy, pretty successful filmmaker, and won the British Oscar for one of my films, meaningless to me now. Utterly meaningless, because films can only create awareness. We have enough awareness. We know what's wrong.

What we have to do now is stand up, be counted, commit to prevention, commit to changing things in the next generation or we are just headed straight for that catastrophe that H.G. Wells spoke of. The education that I believe is the meaningful definition here, is the one Mandela coined.

You spoke about him earlier, Hitendra, and for me also, he's one of the most inspiring seminal gurus of my life. I remembered as I sat in those Delhi prison cells with those rapists, looking into their eyes, trying to find out what kind of human beings did what they did to that young girl on the moving bus. The subject of my then film, India's Daughter. I remember this refrain kept on coming, unbidden, washing over my brain like a wave on ashore and kept on. Mandela said, "Education is the most powerful weapon we have to change the world."

And I'm sitting there thinking, well, I know you're right about that, because these men that I've sat and interviewed for all of these hours, what they all have in common is a lack of education. Only one of them has finished secondary school. Then I get the shock of my life, which is that I start to interview their lawyers, all the lawyers on all sides, the prosecution, defense lawyers, they're much worse than the rapists in what they are uttering. And I come to the realization and understanding that it's not that kind of education that makes the difference here that changes the world, right? It's not the education that was designed in and for the Industrial Revolution two and a half centuries ago, right? For what purpose? As a conveyor belt between classroom and labor market? No, it's not that kind of education, which is no longer fit for purpose, as far as I'm concerned. It's very different, it's the missing kind of education. It's that education that educates the heart, not just the mind. It's that education that as we call it in Think Equal, empowering change through education. It's social and emotional learning for wellbeing, psychosocial support, post-Covid critically important and our third pillar, social justice.

When you teach that to 3 to 6 year olds, you can change the world and quickly so. You see the results within 4 or 5 months, we have 3 years' worth, 3 levels of this program we've built with world experts, thought leaders like Sir Ken Robinson and the co-directors of Yale University Center for Emotional Intelligence, Dr. Marc Brackett, Dr. Robin Stern, Richard Davidson, one of the most brilliant neuroscientists in the world, Dr. Urvashi Sahni from Lucknow, who is an expert at empowering girls through education and smashing toxic masculine stereotypes, etc.

Sorry, long answers. I must stop talking so much.

I love him. He's such a great man, a great thinker. We use his best practice kindness curriculum, which he and the Dalai Lama had a huge influence in the writing of. We use that as part of our level 1 for the 3-year-olds teaching our children to focus on the inside, on the outside, to relax, to show kindness. It is a useful program.

It's a brilliant question, Hitendra, and it's a critically important question. I don't pretend we've solved it, because we're dealing with imperfection. We have to. Otherwise, we just give up and say, you know what? They're always going to be these bad influences in the world. Let's just succumb to them and let's just go to sleep and succumb to this, what Pope Francis calls, I think it's one of the most searing phrases I've ever heard, it's so utterly accurate. He's called it the "Globalization of indifference." Isn't that an extraordinary phrase? In the encyclical that he wrote for the world, called "Laudato Si." If anyone wants to look it up, it's a beautiful letter to the universe and all about taking care of the Earth, our common home. I digress. But to get back to your question, it is critically important.

We do triangulate our learning. We recognize that the children, although they now spend more time at school generally than they do with their parents, they still spend time at home. They are still there with parents who are pursuing wealth as though that is the most important value in life, because that's what they've been taught and been programmed to do, who are aggressive to each other, because they haven't learned Think Equal, right?

We also know from Maria Montessori, and it's true because we're seeing it happen with our very eyes, children as the agents of social change. Our parents tell us that children are going home and teaching their parents. I was in Khayelitsha, a township in South Africa just two and a half months ago, and we were there taking records, and doing a bit of filming of the children and how they are interacting with Think Equal and what they think about it and what they're learning and the teachers. We asked this school in this township Khayelitsha, one of the most poverty stricken, and actually dangerous places. Two taxi drivers refused to take me there because it's a dangerous place. Parents came, they wanted to come to say thank you in the case of one parent, this child of hers, a 4-year-old, the mother said, "She has saved my marriage". She has saved my family. I was divorcing from my husband. I was in a deep depression, and my child would come home and say, "Mummy, I'm going to teach you how to breathe. You have to breathe like this, and it's going to help you go from the blue, which is very sad, into the green, which is very calm, nice and relaxed and then we're going to move you to the yellow where you're going to be happy Mummy". I mean, literally she's giving testimony and the number of stories we're hearing of that nature.

But let's not focus on the highly optimistic stories that we've been given. Let's assume they're optimistic, right? Let's be realistic here. Yes, of course it's going to be a break on the children, a break on their progress that they go home and see their father smack their mother in the face. Of course, that's going to be a break and they will be confused and upset by that, but they will know that is wrong. They will know that there is a kind way to discuss problems and solve problems, etc. right?

In the classroom, the teachers, believe me Hitendra, the early years' teachers are not there for the money because they are so derided and underpaid and under respected and undervalued. At least 98%, they are there because they believe they love children. They want to nurture and help children. They believe that taking care of these kids is an important thing to do, and heaven knows it is, because if the children have one adult role model in their lives, who is caring, it makes an enormous difference to the rest of their lives and what we give the teachers is prescriptive and it has to be, because they don't know how to teach this subject. Nobody has ever taught it to them. It's a brand new subject. So we give them the narrative picture books one a week, which unpack these extraordinary 25 competencies and skills, the resources that go along with that, plus the 3 lesson plans for every week, bullet point by bullet point, action by action, gather your children into a circle, ask the children do we all have hair? Ask them if we all have the same kind of hair. Discuss the differences moving towards, we're teaching them that we all have hair, we all have eyes. They're all different. Everyone has differences. We all have skin but do we have the same color skin? No we don't, and in this lesson, a particular one I've picked out of several that I could have, we're teaching that every human being on Earth is brown.

There's no such thing as black people and white people. We show them a gorgeous little girl in the middle of these six portraits who's very dark skinned, and we ask what color she is, and they say black. The teacher is then told, now ask them if she's black, what color is her hair then? You imagine a child who people call black. Of course, she's not black. She's dark brown, I'm light brown. We prove that with one brown crayon that we also put in this 4.5 kg box of resources. The teachers have everything they require.

Now, if you were an early year's teacher and saw extraordinary changes in your children, if you saw a child who walked in at 3 and is pulling everyone's hair that he or she can grab hold of, a child who comes in angry, violent, with temper tantrums and within 4 or 5 months is the kindest child you've taught in 15 years, you'd want to carry on with this program, and you'd want to take it seriously and give it the respect it deserves and you're being trained while you're teaching it how to teach the subject. We're training you while you're teaching it, because if we stepped back and said, "We have got to train you first, we've got to change you."

Number one, chance would be a fine thing to change someone fundamentally without years of therapy after the age of 6. Number two, we'd have to take off a few decades while we train the whole workforce of early years' teachers. Impossible. Not impossible, but unrealistic.

So, we've taken a very realistic realpolitik, proactive approach. We want change now. We can't wait. This is urgent. The next generation deserves it. What we say to education ministers and parents and people generally, policy makers especially, is if we genuinely take seriously that we have a duty of care, to our youngest children being the most vulnerable citizens in our society, how on earth can we say it's compulsory for them to learn numeracy? That it's compulsory for them to learn how to read and how to write. But it's optional for them to learn how to value another human being. It's optional for them to learn how to value themselves and have self-esteem. How to lead healthy relations. How can this be optional? Nobody's teaching it. Not concretely, not tangibly, not the most so-called developed country. I don't believe there's a single developed country in the whole world. Until they teach this and stop neglecting our children nobody can call themselves developed.

Hundreds and hundreds of stories. Hitendra, I want to say you are so right to pull me up short on that. You're absolutely right. It's something I don't like about myself. I have kind of given up on the older generation, as it were. I shouldn't, because I'm not reliant on having to do that. It's not that one thing is mutually exclusive with the other, but my fear is this or my fundamental belief is, that's why I go that extra step is this, but whereas the teachers are there in an objective role in a sense. The teachers are not there saying, I'm going to make sure that you hate the Tamils because they killed your grandfather and whatever in Sri Lanka? Or I am going to make sure that you do not play with those Arab children over there, because whatever it is and the religious bigotry or parents who suddenly say, yes, I'm holding this life in my hand, I've got to be so much more responsible and you know what? I'm going to teach this girl; she's going nowhere dangerous. She's not going out after dark. Biases, prejudices actually become more entrenched very often when your value system takes a little bit of a turn.

Because what I'm saying is, you have to work really hard when you're grown up at dropping your biases. A parent whose child comes and says, "Mommy, daddy. I've got to tell you this because I'm not living as myself. I'm gay". Yes, of course, we live in a much freer world now, but if you have been brought up with certain prejudices, you've got to be a giant human being to just be able to drop them, because your daughter, who you love, comes and tells you that, or your son comes and tells you. We can't expect that of human beings. If only we had taught everybody that life itself and happiness of our next generation and our children is the paramount value. Not wealth, but happiness.

What was Mandela's definition of education? Very simple. It's one of his most famous quotes, "No child is born hating another human being because of the color of their skin, their religion, their gender, any other factor, a child has to be taught to hate. If he can be taught to hate, he can be taught to love." Parents have not been taught to love. Teachers have not been taught to love but teachers are being given a script, as it were. It's not about putting things into the child's head. That would never work. You need a partnership of learning. You need the child active, experientially learning. Which is what we do here, and the teacher is very much inviting responses a lot of the time from the children.

But, you're right, I should admit much more shade within. But I'll tell you what I think it is just to explore. I shouldn't be sitting excusing myself.

That will help them for sure. They will reflect very seriously on their own children and how they're treating them. I'm saying we do ameliorate, we do make a difference. But what I mean to say is that when we build a generation that is fundamentally loving, fundamentally good, fundamentally without these divisive prejudices, that is when the world is happy, not when someone has to struggle to put aside the thought that they've been weaned on and they're having to struggle against their second nature versus reaction.

Hitendra, if I may just for one second and then I'll drop my personal involvement in this, you know, it's so difficult what I'm doing, because I have chosen for myself. It's a double edged sword. I'm very proud of it but I've chosen for this to be global. I will not be satisfied if before I die, there are any children in any classrooms, in any part of the world. Now, we're in 30 countries in six and a half years. I haven't got that many years left. I've got to start making sure that these countries are coming on board at a faster rate. So I can see at least half my dream before I die. But it takes so much out of me. It takes 18 hours a day, seven days a week, no holidays, no real interaction with my family, because I have this overwhelming goal that I'm utterly convinced by. So I have to see it in so-called black and white terms. I mean that we've got to focus really narrowly, really incisively on this 3 to 6-year-old small furrow, because that's how we're going to make the biggest change.

That's all I'm focusing on. I leave it to others to work on the others and the rest, just in terms of why do I do that? Because I also have to prop up my energy and my belief and keep on going. It's a tough job.

I am not as big as that. That's where the comparison ends.

Yeah, it makes total sense. Actually, the truth is in these 18 hour days and seven day weeks, I do go. I have been to Harvard 3 times to speak to the law school and the women's group because I do actually at the end of the day, I do believe that we need also to pass the baton on. I mean no individual or even hundreds of individuals can do this work. It's too big. So inspiring others, persuading others, bringing them on board to do this kind of work and to consider the investment made in early years. I'd go anywhere to persuade people of that, I'd go to boardrooms, I'd go anywhere because I believe in it with all my heart.

If I may tell you a staggering statistic. In the UK, where we've only just managed to break through the brick wall of a government that in an education ministry that just didn't want to know, didn't want to listen, couldn't care less, really, is how I experienced it. Pushed away. No, we're already doing this. Really? How are you doing it? I asked one of the UK education ministers, Nicky Morgan. She said the citizenship program. I said, "Nicky, the citizenship program starts at the age of 11 and it deals with British values. What are we talking about?" Even a fundamental lack of understanding of what is needed and what we were doing. Well, we finally broke through with an enlightened, extraordinary, visionary Mayor Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester, which is north of England, 10 districts and their visionary education team come together and say, "We believe in this. We want to take it up." They take it up. We're now with 62,500 children across these 10 districts. Who is funding it? Not the Education Ministry, the National Health Service or mental health teams.

Who's funding the 3 year olds, because they're now doing it on 2 levels. The 4 year olds in reception and the 3 year olds in nursery, it is the Police. The Violence Reduction Unit of the Police are funding them because they know that the first 5, 6 years have everything to do with how the next 80 turn out. They know that criminals don't just start at the age of 18. When I say criminals, I don't mean a criminal mind. I mean people who are experienced, having experienced trauma and adverse childhood experiences and haven't had the tools, haven't had the learning to deal with their extreme sadness, which becomes depression and mental health disorder, which means suicide is the number one killer of our young men under 40, which means, when we teach gender equality, we take care of our boys not just our girls, right? Our boys have a lot of care to be given to them in terms of ensuring they're not in this emotional straitjacket. "Man up. Don't cry like a girl". It's one of the worst things we can do to our boys.

But, here's the astounding statistic. It costs exactly the same amount of money to give the Think Equal program to 48,000 children as it costs to pay the prison incarceration costs for one year of one violent offender. One violent offender. Even if we are 0.00001% successful, we've broken even. I mean, it's utterly ridiculous and we are shooting ourselves in the foot over and over again. We are just not making sense of things anymore. How utterly stupid can they be in the Treasury without their calculator able to work out that if you do this, you prevent violent offenders from growing up? I mean, please. The police know it in Greater Manchester. That's why they're funding the 3 year olds to get this program.

Or you would call it spanking. Maybe that's more American, but yeah, it's the same evil spanking, hitting children.

Well, I couldn't agree more and this is part of what I'm talking about. Until and unless we break the cycle in the next generation, the next generation of children who have been through the Think Equal program for even one of the three years that we have, right? They didn't have to. They're not sequential. You don't have to do 1, 2, 3. You can jump in at 3. You can start at level 2. As long as you have one year of this, you will be transformed for the rest of your life to a pro-social being. With 60 years' worth of longitudinal studies proving this and we've done 3 randomized control tests in 3 very disparate countries and we have got the proof. We're evidence based, we're neuroscience led, etc. It's the breaking of that habit, you see, because people are spanking their children or smacking them or whatever they want to call it because they were smacked or spanked as children. Generally speaking, this is that cyclical generational thing that happens. I wouldn't lift a finger to anyone, but I have to teach my child boundaries. My child needs to know the boundaries. It's for his or her own good. Just a little smack. Oh my God! It is an absolute taboo. It's a no. You do not hit people. Not when you are a reasonable human being and our Think Equal children will never hit anyone. They won't.

Please bring them in. By the way, if you're not a school, but you're a community center, we have endless iterations of this. We have animations that we've created, beautiful animations with stars like Olivia Colman and Chimamanda Adichie, this brilliant Nigerian novelist, and David Oyelowo, Shabana Azmi, Emma Thompson, Dame Helen Mirren, Susan Sarandon, amazing actors and actresses, narrating. We have, as I say, the parents' home kits. We have a TV program, actually, which we give to countries for free when they want a platform to ensure that their parents will understand the importance of early years. The parents enjoy these television episodes, 40 of them for kids. We have amazing numbers and we have a trauma informed version in Ukrainian currently in Ukraine for 3 to 12 year olds, because in emergencies and refugee settings, in IDP settings, we don't have the luxury of 3 to 4 year olds and 5 to 6 year olds together.

We have all of these iterations. I would say first port of call, go to our website. Our website is www.thinkequal.org, because we're a total not-for-profit. We're an org rather than a.com. But there you have, contact Think Equal which always comes to me. I'm happy to give you all my email address. I will take any email from anyone who's interested in furthering this work. I will answer you.

There are so many things people can do. Persuade your school. How many children do you know in your circle who attend, who are sort of 3 to 6 and attend nurseries or reception classes or kindergartens? Take this to the head and say, listen, 30 countries around the world can't be wrong. Four of them are doing this compulsorily for every child in their country. This is a program I believe is a great program. Please just take a look at it. I want my child and the children in his or her class to benefit from this. That's one tiny bit of advocacy that's huge for us, because the more schools, classrooms do this, the more they talk about its brilliance and the more it spreads. That's helping us do our work. Heaven knows, you can always obviously donate. I hate to say that, because one doesn't want to go touting for funding, but of course we need funding because how are we going to get this done without that? Everything costs, the printing costs. There is so much that can be done. If you are a recent graduate and want to give us some internship time, we will take anyone who will help us with this critical agenda, particularly for the time we find ourselves in now. We have to win that race to make sure we do not end in catastrophe and take care of our people and our planet.

Thank you Hitendra, I believe that, but I'm always shy about it. It's in my DNA. It's something to do with my upbringing.

Hitendra, look how clever I am. I've made you say it.

You're wonderful! You have said that and I agree. Give until it hurts. Well, I do anyway. But I must say one more thing. I have never in my life in all my years, and you can see there have been plenty of them. I have never been happier. I have never been more rewarded, full of hope, full of optimism and it's the only way I can get through the rest of my life, seeing how bad it's getting, knowing that in certain parts and certain classrooms and certain settings, it's getting better and better and better. That is the antidote. This is a vaccination against hatred, greed and selfishness.

100% we have a number of books that deal with this. One of our 25 competencies and skills that we teach is peaceful conflict resolution, Critical thinking is another thing and problem solving. There are a number of books I can immediately think of. One is set in Mostar during the Balkan conflict, and it's about 2 children who were divided by a conflict. We just call it fighting in the book. We don't go into the negatives too heavily because we're modeling the positives. But these 2 children who take a heart and tear it in half and by the end of the story, they're leaning against their divided building's balconies and putting the two pieces of the heart together. It is the most beautiful story.

Then there is Dedgy and Neddy, and the very large cushion, who fight over the cushion because it is the most comfortable cushion in the class. I want it, but you had it last time and we teach our children through these narrative journeys of character and story. If there's one contribution I made to Think Equal, apart from obviously, my determination and my tireless work, it is that as a former film maker, I know the value and the critical importance of empathy. I know that empathy is the glue that holds all of our other 24 competencies and skills together, and I know that films and story and character are the ultimate seminal way of experiencing empathy.

You cannot be empathetic in theory. This whole business of putting yourself in that person's shoes is a load of nonsense. It just doesn't work. It's cognitive procedural thinking only. You need, as I always say, to take the children's hearts and squeeze them. We had a head of a nursery in Greater Manchester only a couple of weeks ago write to me to say, "I love all the books, the teachers love all the books, the children do. But I have one favorite book and that is Diego's great idea." It deals with a young girl who's in a wheelchair. Her name is Amina. She can't play with the others at break time when they play their ball games, etc. and Diego's great idea actually is putting him and his friends on roller skates so that they can play with Amina with her wheels and their wheels. She says, "This is my favorite book of all time, because when I see my 3 to 4-year-old children crying, when they listen to this story and tears are falling down their faces, I see empathy in action." These are her words.

It's the most generous political act you can make. The most generous act you can make to another human being is to feel things from their point of view, not to put yourself in their shoes and think, oh well, they must be feeling this and that, but to feel it with them. I can't even remember your question now, but I hope it was an appropriate answer. I sometimes go off on little tangents.

No, I'm going to write it down.

Because they get inspired, you see. They see that there is hope for them to behave in just as admirable and positive way. Yeah, I think that's brilliant. I'm going to look him up now.

You can do that incrementally. You see, I am also in my 60s and I haven't got that much time left. If I want to see this dream come true of a world that I am proud to say, my children, I'm not leaving them in the midst of a catastrophic, vile world, where people are blowing each other up. If I am to see that dream come true, I can't do it incrementally. I haven't got the time. I wish that I'd come to this so much earlier in life. But it's all those things that are needed to lead you towards this path you then choose and find yourself compelled to walk as well. It is a compulsion. I couldn't stop this if I tried. I mean, I just couldn't. There's no way I could.

We do. The parenting home kit that isn't allied to the classroom kit because we've got 2 versions. One where the child is learning Think Equal in the classroom, which is the transformative learning, and then it's deepened and made more profound by the home kit. Then we have a wholly parent animated version of all our books, which is pretty inexpensive at $69 for 12 animations and 60 activities to do with them and then you have a series of them you can keep going if you want to, up to about 72 books or animations. The website is worth exploring because there are these wonderful things around it.

Gosh, that is such a difficult question, because immediately I'm flooded with so many. The small personal ones, the large personal ones. I talk about this because it's important. It's part of what led me to be who I am. I was raped at 18. This was a seminal, very formative experience, but it took me 20 years to realize what it actually meant. Because in my day, when I was 18, many decades ago, you didn't tell anyone because you knew that as a girl you'd have the finger pointed straight at you and tell, "Why did you trust the guy? What were you?" But in a way that I think was a seminal experience because it made me understand what it is to be that minority that is just used for this, or disrespected or expected to behave in rigid, restricted ways or whatever it is. That's one thing that definitely has shaped me. No question. It can't not.

In my life, I also came across a really unfair situation in my home. Still the home I'm sitting in right now, where an evil psychopath landlord, it's the only way I can describe him, who used to buy up houses with sitting tenants as they called them, people who had secure tenancies. He would frighten them out by coming and bashing down the doors to their houses, throwing the furniture down the stairs, frightening them, threatening them, arriving at 3 in the morning. This was his modus operandi, because he would frighten you out of the house that he bought at an auction in order to get vacant possession so he could realize a huge profit. His name was Nicholas Van Hoogstraten, still alive and has been in prison many times, etc. I ended up being one of his tenants and took him on and refused to accept, actually fought, and the building was very soon being emptied. It was mostly the men who I think took the threats physically very seriously, who left within a matter of weeks. They were out of there and about 7 flats remained occupied by single women. I was one of them who stayed on and fought. Then I took on this mantle of, I'm not having this, I was 28 or 30 something. If this is a world I'm living in where this guy gets away with that, and I am going to just flee and have to go and find another place. I didn't have much alternatives either. I'm not having it. I need to know if the world is as unjust as this, that he can just get away with it.

So for two and a half years, I studied housing law. I took him to the high court, formed a movement, brought a few houses together and won a legal precedent in the High Court of England. Another seminal lesson for me in the fact that you don't just put up with injustice, you do something about it.

When I went to India to make that film, by the way, it could have been anywhere in the world, gender based violence, the story of every single country in this world. I went there because that was such a heart stopping, shocking case to make that film about Nirbhaya, as they called her, one of the many things they called her the fearless one, Jyoti Singh, was her name.

When I went there to make that, obviously it was related to what had happened to me at 18. So there's so many things I could point to. One of my earliest memories, my mother and father were in the middle of a huge row, and the memory of seeing my mother pick up a shoe and throw it at my father with so much anger and force that it shattered the glass pane in the bedroom door. I mean, that is stuck in my memory. That is a seminal moment that led me to understand that that is a painful, terrible way to live a life. There's so many. I mean, I could sit here literally for the next few hours discussing them. We all of us have those seminal moments that shape us in these unexpected ways, and then we go on this massive adventure and end up where we end up. But I'm kind of stuck where I am now. I'm not going anywhere. This I'm going to finish with my last breath. I'm going to finish this mission.

You've been so wonderful to talk to and thank you for your warmth. I've really enjoyed this. I have to tell you; I don't enjoy them all, and if I could just for one minute just to sort of finish here. Kudos to you. I really mean it. I'm not being humble here falsely. I can't help myself. It's not like I've chosen to be good, right? I have no choice. This is what I do. I've seen the light and I'm following it. I love quotes, because I find them so inspiring.

Anne Frank, when she was hiding in Holland from the Nazis, wrote in her diary, one of the several things she wrote was about the candlelight that was burning in this hiding place, which was pitch dark apart from the candlelight. She said, "This candle that defines and defies the darkness."

At the end of my film, India's Daughter, there is this "deeya," this light from a candle that's going out to sea or along the water. Jyoti Singh's father says, "This is the light that we will see what will come of it." That's the light of her death candle as it is, as it were, right? That is what has happened here. The darkest journey of my life has turned into the most luminous because of the insights gleaned in those cells.

The very last thing is Gandhi Ji, another great mind who said, "If we want to have real peace in this world, we shall have to start with the children."