Politics & Power Quote by Parminder Nagra

A travel list delivered in the blunt, breathless cadence of someone still surprised by her own access. Parminder Nagra isn’t polishing a manifesto here; she’s letting the awe show. The line works because it refuses the usual celebrity travel-brag rhetoric. No adjectives, no luxury signals, just place-names stacked like stamps in a new passport. That plainness reads as sincerity, and it also sneaks in a class-and-immigration subtext: movement is never neutral. For many British South Asian families of Nagra’s generation, “going” is entangled with who gets to cross borders easily, who gets questioned, who feels watched, who feels at home.

The geography is telling. Malaysia sits alongside Germany and Switzerland, then Madrid, then “America” as a catchall continent-country, the way people say it when the idea of the U.S. is bigger than any single city. It’s not a cartographer’s map; it’s the mental map of opportunity. You can hear the career arc behind it: an actor whose work suddenly creates a life measured in flights, festivals, press tours, and sets, where the world expands faster than your language for describing it.

Nagra, best known for roles that sit at the crossroads of diaspora identity and mainstream visibility, has often been cast as the “in-between” figure. This quote flips that framing. The subtext isn’t confusion; it’s arrival. The simplicity becomes the point: access, once unimaginable, is now a matter-of-fact itinerary.