I think of choosing as a... both a fun and an effortful activity and I think of choice as something that in order for you to really get what you want out of it you have to put a lot into it and so I'm only willing to do that for a few different things and for the rest I really just try to either satisfy, come up with a simple rule or let somebody else make the choice.

What leads us astray is confusing more choices with more control. Because it is not clear that the more choices you have the more in control you feel. We have more choices than we've ever had before.

So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.

I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.

There is a different attitude about, you know, how much differentiation there needs to be between our options and how many choices do I need to have in order to make a choice.

In America we tell our parents to bring their child home and put him or her in a crib; as they get older, children sleep in they own room not in Mom and Dad's room. What are we training them for? It's independence, because that's what being empowered is all about.

Being a Sikh meant having to do what Mom and Dad said, and going to temple, and Mom and Dad choosing who I would marry. But going to an American school taught me that I was the one who's supposed to make those choices.