My privacy is important: Farhan Akhtar

Farhan Akhtar says that parents often feel the need to control their kids or have some power over their choices, but he's trying hard to get rid of that with his daughters

Quite a fair bit is written about your multiple skills, but nothing about your family life ever makes it to print. How is that possible?
I somehow don't want to make my personal life public. To me, my privacy is important as far as my family is concerned. I don't want my kids to get, somehow into this space... 'Oh my father does this and people talk about it'. It can skew with your head a little bit. I think it is important that to them, we just appear as regular people. So, it's kind of important to keep them away from all this.

And this 'need' to keep it that way comes from personal experience?
Not really. Although my dad was a very, very famous writer when I was born, he was still relatively behind the scenes. And you don't get the same kind of adulation from the public that you get when you are an actor. There is a difference and we shouldn't fool ourselves. So, when you are acting and you are out and about, like I don't know somehow, children are very impressionable at a certain age. With my older daughter it is a lot easier now. She is almost 11. She now understands what's going on. The younger one, just from hearing the music and seeing me on TV, gets worked up and recently I took her for a concert I did and she got very upset when people were screaming my name, she didn't know what to do. Because she always thought that she should get that love and attention. So, to me it's important, she is sensitive to all this, so it's important for me that when I am out with them, it's only about us. Because you cannot tell people 'don't come and talk to me', 'I don't want to take a photo', etc. But to the kid, it feels like - 'Oh, am I not the only important person?' So, I tend to keep them out of this all.

But when you guard something so fiercely, doesn't it attract more attention?
I think it is possible. When you don't know enough about someone, I think, just to get a reaction so that they speak about their life, some stories appear so that you go and defend yourself. But, eventually you come to understand that a lot of rumours is stuff that people tend to forget. At the end of the day, when there's no truth in it, it will pan out. It will prove itself to be false. Then you come to an understanding that you should let it pass. It's important to focus on that time instead of focussing on the people who have written it. You focus more on your family and just make sure that they understand why this is happening, that they understand that this has nothing to do with the truth. I think that's more important to me

Do you ever need to clarify to your family?
At the end of the day, I can tell my daughter not to watch a film that is rated adult, but how do I stop her from picking up the newspaper? And if she picks up a newspaper which has a headline which says 'Farhan Akhtar having an affair' with whoever, now that's something that needs explaining. My wife understands that, but for a kid, they have no clue about what the truth is. What they are reading in the newspaper is what they actually think is the truth. So that does need work. Then you sit with them and tell them this is crap, and you needn't pay attention.

How do you escape from the constant scrutiny of your public life and your public persona?
Mainly by travelling. I think it helps because you can go to places where people don't know you. That is always nice. And then you spend time with friends of course, people who are not from the film world and they also help you keep things in a certain perspective because for them you are the guy they have known for the last 25 years. If you say something silly in a newspaper, they can always turn around and they'd be like, 'Dude, did you actually say this?' You realise there is a world outside that is also reacting to things. And then there's your family.

Is Farhan a friends' person or a family person?
I'm trying to make my family my friend. I think it's an effort and it's not easy but I think that is eventually what needs to happen. I think especially with parents and kids, the great gap that happens in generations is when parents cannot take the step to just become friends with their children because they feel that they need to control them or they think that they need to discipline them further or they have to have some power over their choices. So, that's the kind of divide I am working towards getting rid off. And I think my dad and my mum did it very successfully with Zoya and me. Of course, I have a lot of love and regard for them as my parents, but I do consider them today to be more like my best friends.

Achieving that balance is quite a struggle...
It takes work from both sides, but it takes more from the parents' side because they are letting go of a lot more than you. You are just accepting it to be a certain way and a kid will always expect the parent to understand them. It's very rare that a parent will wonder why is their kid is not understanding him or her! It's the parent who is supposed to understand the kid.