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Kajol on Nysa, Yug growing up amid pap culture: My daughter had been hounded…
Kajol opens up about raising Nysa and Yug amid constant paparazzi attention and reflects on 30 years of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.
Actor Kajol, recently seen in the horror film Maa, opens up about parenting under public scrutiny and how her children, Nysa (22) and Yug (14), have coped with the relentless paparazzi culture. She tells us, “Honestly, they’ve handled it with more grace than I have!” adding, “They still are handling it with a lot more grace than I am, in fact, with a lot more acceptance as well.”
She continues, “We’ve had a lot of conversations over it and I know for a fact that my daughter especially has been hounded [by cameras] since she was 14 or 15, which is not correct. It was not right. Sharing how the constant media attention leads to a different lifestyle, Kajol says, “You need security to go out, you can’t do a lot of things that you probably you would have been able to do (otherwise), if you were not hounded. But also, I think somewhere down the line now that she’s a little more grown up, it’s a little more, I wouldn’t say acceptable at all, but it’s something that you have to accept, right? So we have no choice in the matter other than to change our perspective on it and handle it with a lot of dignity and grace.”
Ask her if there’s anything she fears most as a mother, and the 50-year-old doesn’t hesitate in saying, “The one thing you are most scared of is something actually harming your child. That’s the one thing you can’t come back out of. Everything else - yes, there’s technology, criticism, failure, which are all things that somewhere down the line, with time and space, fix. But actual physical harm is something that you cannot fix easily and may not be able to fix at all. That is an unimaginable threat to a parent.”
On whether she has been a strict parent, Kajol admits there’s been a shift as her children have grown older. “I am. I was a lot more, but I think somewhere down the line now that they’ve grown up, I can’t really fire them too much. But, yes, I think that it’s very important for them till today to understand that there are lines that you do not cross and I think that will just make them better human beings,” says the actor.
When asked about the parenting values passed down from her mother, veteran actor Tanuja, Kajol shares, “I’ve learned so many things (from her), unconsciously and subconsciously. Her tone of voice, her ability to stop me in my tracks wherever I was — I’ve inherited that. Most importantly, the one thing that I took from her was I understood finally, after rebelling for god knows how many years as a child, how important discipline was for children. It is one thing that children absolutely need to grow. It’s like when you plant a tree, sometimes it requires that we put a border around it so that it grows straight and strong. That support comes from love and discipline.”
‘Shooting DDLJ was like being on one long working holiday’
Meanwhile, on Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge - which continues to hold the record as the longest-running film in Indian cinema history - turning 30 this year, Kajol says she always knew they were making a good film because the script was "fantastic".
Summing up her experience of working on the film which also starred Shah Rukh Khan, she says, “I had a great time. I worked with my friends and had a blast. I knew we were making a good film because the script was fantastic and we all laughed through it. We ate good food, travelled around Switzerland in a bus, and just generally had the best time. It was like being on one long working holiday." She adds, "Yes, parts of it were ridiculous, like trying to drape a sari in a cow shed and rolling down a hill by mistake. Who rolls down a hill by mistake! But I’ve done that. It was like [we were] running to finish, changing clothes, and before the sunsets, we would sometimes have 15 minutes for the shot. All that madness — I loved every bit of it."
Ask her why DDLJ still clicks with every generation, and she says, “It’s really the film! It’s everything — the script, Shah Rukh saying those lines, it’s the romance and drama of the nineties in the best way possible!”
Bollywood struggling to draw audiences to theatres? Kajol weighs in
With 34 years in the industry, Kajol has seen Bollywood evolve. Reflecting on the post-pandemic slump in theatre footfalls, she weighs in on whether content is falling short: “Content is king right now. People are only coming in to watch things that really make sense to go and watch on the [big] screen. We have upped our standards; we need to do it, and there’s not one person who does not realise that. We are all slowly but surely upping our standards. We realise that we are at an international level, and we have to compete at that level; we’re not competing at a national level anymore.”
