MUMBAI: Amitabh Bachchan, who is to receive a doctorate from a university in Leicester in Britain, says none of his academic honours will ever match up to his illustrious father’s achievements.

Excerpts from an interview:

Q: The De Montfort University in Leicester is conferring a doctorate on you. How does Dr Bachchan sound to you?

A: Dr Bachchan was my father! With a PhD in English literature from Cambridge on WB Yeats and occultism in 1954, he was perhaps the first Indian to get this distinction from that university. None of my achievements, honours and degrees can and will ever match that... My contribution, if at all there is any, shall always pale in front of my father’s.

Q: You come from a family with an acute literary and scholarly bent of mind. How much of an academic are you at heart? Do you get time to read a lot?

A: I am an acute failure in this department as I am in various others. I have lived and been brought up in an atmosphere of poetry and literature and academics due to my father. Whatever I have, which isn’t much really, is all that I have imbibed or accumulated because of my proximity to my parents.

Q: You are just being your over-modest self.

A: I am serious. The genes reflect in the progeny. My niece, Nilima Bachchan, (brother) Ajitabh’s eldest daughter, has just done a PhD in aeronautical engineering from Britain. If there is a genuine Dr Bachchan after my father, it is she ...I get no time to read. I collect

the latest books and browse through and store them for a rainy day, hoping they

shall give me company when I am confined to a chair or bed. But I am a bad reader.

Q: Do you think formal education is a necessary qualification for an actor? You have been to college. Dilip Kumar hasn’t.

A: I think formal education is necessary for an individual pursuing any vocation. Formal education just does not bring in academic knowledge. It brings with it curriculum, discipline, forbearance, competitiveness, understanding, vision and other qualities essential for everyday existence in a normal society. My days in college may not have a direct reflection on my present profession. But I cannot wish away the other aspects of its benefits to me as an individual. An actor’s performance will always betray his inner build-up as a human. Dilip saab may not have gone to college. But can you really doubt the reflection of the quality of his inner self in his performances? That he developed these qualities independently and not through an educational institution gives so much more credence to his unassailable genius.