Farhan Akhtar is an actor-filmmaker who wears his heart on his sleeve. With him, especially in interviews, there is no beating around the bush, and the refreshing candidness is what makes him that much more affable with the audience. While Farhan is someone who understands the perennial presence of a spotlight on celebrities’ lives, he has also managed to navigate the various changes in his personal life with a sense of dignity. The Dil Chahta Hai director, who was married to Adhuna Bhabani for sixteen years from 2000, even before the release of his first film, separated from her in 2016. They had two children — Shakya and Akira — and Farhan went on to marry Shibani Dandekar in 2022. Exploring the parallels being made between his life and his father and legendary writer Javed Akhtar’s life, Farhan, in an interview with Faye D’Souza, said, “I know what it felt like and there was a huge part of me that was like I cannot do this to my own kids.”
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Responding to a rather poignant but incisive question about his feelings before ending his first marriage, considering the kind of childhood he had, Farhan said, “”It was difficult. A certain aspect of it was of course that I had been through having divorced parents when I was a kid.” He shared that Adhuna and him decided to have an open and heartfelt conversation with their kids to let them know they are not at fault at all. “I felt that it came to a place that if Adhuna and myself spoke to them openly and honestly, and explained to them why we are taking this kind of step, that it doesn’t have anything to do with them. It’s not because of them, it’s not because of anything they did, they said, or because they are here.”
Farhan added that it was also important to let the kids know that their parents came to this decision together. “This is something between two grown up people, who as friends decided that this is something that they want to do. That’s the best we could do,” said the Dil Dhadakne Do actor, who added that this decision has left him with a constant voice at the back of his head. “It’s something that I am going to have to live with for the rest of my life. It’s never going to entirely go away… the thinking about ‘Did they deserve this?’ It’s going to keep coming up. That’s something I guess I’ll just have to live with. The fact that it had happened to me as a kid played a huge role in how I feel about it now.”
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He also spoke about Javed Akhtar and mother Honey Irani’s divorce. He said their separation weighed on him as a child. “Back then, it wasn’t common for parents to be divorced. But because who my parents were, it was public knowledge. If someone wanted to hit you below the belt in the school during a fight, they would say, ‘But your father left your mother’. And it would hurt. So apart from the fact that you were sad it happened, it would make you angry that it could be used against you.”
Meanwhile, Farhan, who was recently seen in the 2021 film, Toofan, is returning to the director’s chair after a 14-year hiatus. The filmmaker is working on Don 3, the third part of his Don series, which will have Ranveer stepping into the shoes of Shah Rukh Khan, who, in turn, played the role made legendary by Amitabh Bachchan in the 1978 original.
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