This is the story of a banker-turned-politician whose sharp words became her boon and bane.
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00:00Today I ask the same question, Emperor, where are your clothes?
00:15I went to Mount Holyoke College.
00:17I worship Ma Kali and I've been elected twice from a border constituency.
00:21My mother was a housewife, my father was a working man.
00:41If I came second, instead of coming first, I'd go into a complete depression and cry
00:45and howl and do all of these things.
00:46I was always what, unfortunately, in slang was termed a smart-ass.
00:51When you washed dishes, you got $4.75 an hour, but when you graduated to teaching, you got
01:14$5.50.
01:21I remember the first year, I never came back to India.
01:40I didn't take a weekend off my first year.
01:42There were days I didn't do laundry for two weeks.
01:56Do I want to come back for my 20th reunion or my 25th reunion, being another managing
02:01director at J.B.
02:02Do I want to come back having made a difference?
02:50It's the very last seat in Bengal on the Bangladesh border.
03:04So my area has 122 kilometers of unfenced border.
03:07So you have a little rivulet running through, you're Bangladesh on the other.
03:20I went from living the high life in investment banking to becoming an MLA from the Bangladesh
03:24border where I didn't have a toilet and I didn't have drinking water.
03:30There is a powerful and continuing nationalism that is searing into our national fabric.
03:42It is superficial, it is xenophobic, and it is narrow.