Adhir Kalyan

If I hadn't left South Africa, I felt I was at risk of being pigeonholed. I looked around and saw actors who, 10 to 15 years into their careers, were still playing stereotypical Afrikaans characters, stereotyped Indian characters. That was not something that I wanted for myself.

All of the actors that have served to me as inspiration over the years have been those more associated with dramatic work who have, in turn, been able to embody their characters and lose themselves in those characters that they create.

What I try to do with the accent of any character I play is not necessarily to do something that's generic - an Indian accent and that's how it sounds, for example. I think the accent needs to sound authentic on this person.

In some cases we've been building tools that are specific to Linux for the desktop, and they only work on Linux, but I see two major projects that are wildly, wildly successful: Mozilla and OpenOffice, and those two programs are cross platform.

I watched a lot of soap operas like 'General Hospital' and 'Days Of Our Lives.' When it came to movies, my parents were quite strict. They would watch 'Flash Dance' but wouldn't let us see the whole film because Jennifer Beals' character was a stripper. It was so funny when I finally saw the whole film. I thought she was a ballerina!