Despite my parents’ hopes of having their daughter someday go to med school and marry a mustachioed engineer of their choosing, they nurtured my creativity by requiring daily writing and reading and enrolling me in many dance and performance classes. I spent my early grade school years as a spelling bee queen but transitioned into cheerleader by high school.

I like to think it all began in Ceramics class in high school. I never fully mastered the potter’s wheel, eroticized as it was by the film “Ghost.” I made hideous sculptures and lop-sided vases that my family proudly displayed at home.

During a parent-teacher conference my art teacher could only tell my mother one thing–”Your daughter should be a model!” She told me that he spent an hour talking about my “presence” and physical attributes. I was flattered of course and took this vocational advice to heart. Though looking back he might have just wanted to kindly tell me I had no future in pottery. Still, I ended up in LA and never touched a piece of clay again.

Some were born to be artists, some were born to muses.

My modeling credits include Playboy, Maxim, FHM and other such publications that horrify my Indian parents and make them question what awful things they did in their past lives to have such a daughter.