People would make fun of me because my father had two wives: Alia Bhatt

Actor speaks about her family life and her relationship with her father.

When Bollywood actor Alia Bhatt was asked in an interview whether it was tough for her emotionally to accept that her father had two families, she replied:  “Yes, initially, while growing up, I was never insecure, but it has impacted me in a way that I don’t want to get married until I want to have babies. When I was growing up, people would make fun of me in school because my father had two wives.

For some reason, I was not embarrassed as he was staying in my house. Probably, had he not been living with me, it would have affected me in a different way. But I do have this fear of my father and mother not being together.

Recently just a few days back, when I was in Chandigarh, I had this dream that they have gotten divorced and it led to me having a bad night. I wasn’t happy and I woke up feeling uneasy.

We are not a normal family. After a very long time we have gotten close as a family. We don’t sit and eat together. We used to never talk to each other and only talk now. I created this family BBM group which has me, my sister, my mom and my father, and he says, ‘I love this group’. We would earlier always be doing our own thing; he would not even know which class I was in. Of course, now he wants to know everything about which shoot I am going for the next day and how much money I am getting; we are finally talking to each other. He is not a conventional father. He was always very busy and then he would come back home and watch his news. He would say, ‘You should fail and you must get 35%’. He hates teachers and feels they give us nonsense. He never told me how to do it; I just figured it on my own. I am loving being closer to all of them, but I like it only on messages and not face-to-face.

Last year, when I was shooting in Ahmedabad, my father was there to promote Aashiqui 2 and had visited me on the set of 2 States. He recently asks me, ‘Are you dating Arjun or what?’ Six months later, he is telling me, ‘I sensed something in the van when I came to Ahmedabad’, even though there is nothing. He likes Arjun.

My dad calls me in Chandigarh and tells me, ‘Alia, with great difficulty, I say this that suddenly I am being referred to as your father.’ He was happy, but also depressed. I started laughing and he laughed as well. And I don’t think it is true. I need to push the envelope very much. I am still known as Mahesh Bhatt’s daughter. But my objective is for him to be universally known as Alia Bhatt’s father,” reported Times of India. 

Published in The Express Tribune, March 31^st,2014.

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