Soon he stopped outside a local police station. One minuta please, he said. Then I realised he was an off-duty cop!

Illustration/Uday Mohite

The festival director of one of the top film festivals in the world was sharing his journey. He said he started out as a volunteer, and if I remember right, he said they offered him the post of a chauffeur. He refused and said he wanted to do something in programming. He joined programming, and years later, is head of one of the top festivals. I recall this, not only to underline how great careers can start innocuously with a simple bit of volunteering, but also to honour the post he turned down—chauffeurs!

Now, I’ve been a train girl all my life. My family has never owned a car—or driver. In an unforgiving city like Mumbai, where I spent one hour each way by train, so two hours down the drain daily when I was in mainstream journalism—a car commute would mean about three-four hours daily, and I simply didn’t have the patience for a car. Most of my friends in Europe don’t have cars........

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