As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder than it's taken off you and swapped for another. The jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan, like the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the crown jewels.
Interpretation
The struggles of being a minority are ongoing and constantly changing, making it difficult to fully appreciate one's achievements.
In this quote, Riz Ahmed reflects on the experience of being part of a minority group. He suggests that just when one learns to embrace and value their struggles and accomplishments, new challenges arise that overshadow the previous ones. The metaphor of the Koh-i-Noor diamond symbolizes how these struggles can be perceived as valuable, yet they are transient and not truly owned, highlighting the ongoing nature of minority experiences and the challenges they face.
In practice
In a speech about diversity and inclusion, one could quote this to emphasize the continual struggles faced by minority groups.
I get good references from a wide range of music. Something who's been a good influence in the last few years is Qawwali music. If you listen to a Qawwali singer like Aziz Mian - he's like James Brown. Qawwali is like Pakistani gospel-jazz. It's emotional, but it's also improvised, and it's all about that sacred-and-profane tightrope.
No one's of Pakistani origin in any British show. That's why every actor of color is here working in the States. It's true.
Rehearsing a scene beds a role into you. But sometimes, if you over-rehearse it without unearthing any new meaning in it, you can suddenly forget your lines. You realise that you are on a stage, not in the real world. The scene's emotional power, and your immersion in it, disappears.
Being South Asian in the U.K. is like being Latino in the U.S., I would guess. It's a bit more hood. You see things; things happen. I was bouncing between worlds. You're acting from a very early age, when you have to code-switch like that. I'm a hybrid, a mongrel. I think many people live that life.
I'm an actor. Since I was a teenager, I have had to play different characters, negotiating the cultural expectations of a Pakistani family, Brit-Asian rudeboy culture, and a scholarship to private school. The fluidity of my own personal identity on any given day was further compounded by the changing labels assigned to Asians in general.
Sometimes when you're inside a story, it's almost better if you don't think too much about its wider cultural significance or if you don't think about how audiences might react to it. That takes you out of the reality of the situation you're committing to as you're telling the story.
It's what I was born for, isn't it? If I don't go, why am I alive?
People don't realize it, but no one lives that rock and roll life 24-7. They think it's hundreds of bottles of champagne flowing and private jets and money. But there's a lot of time when you're traveling - time to think, time to be lonely. Sometimes it gets to you.
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all.
I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oftentimes disagreeable... I suppose I'm larger than life.
Life by the yard is hard; by the inch it's a cinch. Each of us can be true for just one day--and then one more and then one more after that--until we've lived a lifetime guided by the Spirit, a lifetime close to the Lord, a lifetime of good deeds and righteousness.
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