Hiranya Peiris

That's right.

So my mother was a bridge engineer.

She designed bridges.

She was one of Sri Lanka's first female civil engineers.

And my father worked on big hydroelectric projects.

Yeah, she's so good at so many different things, but she's very humble about it.

And that is a quality that I really aspire to.

I have a particular image in my mind of accompanying my mother when I was a small child to a building site where she was supervising a very large team of men constructing a bridge that she had designed.

And she was very elegantly dressed in a sari and she was very dignified.

She was clearly in charge, but she wasn't shouting.

She wasn't projecting dominance.

It was a different kind of leadership.

And I really connected with that image.

That's right.

I remember just being completely transfixed by these really vast horizons that he opened up, both space and time, how the universe connected to us as people.

And that really was magical.

That was cool.

So my aunt gave me a Sinhalese translation of 2001, A Space Odyssey.

So that was when I became really, really hooked in science fiction.

I became a real geek.