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. Nysa has been hounded [by cameras] since she was 14 or 15, which was not right.”

Sharing how the 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 would’ve been able to do otherwise. But also, now that Nysa’s a little more grown up, it’s something that you have to accept, right? So, we have no choice other than to change our perspective and handle it with a lot of dignity and grace.”

When asked about the parenting values she picked up from her mother, actor Tanuja, Kajol says much of it was absorbed “unconsciously and subconsciously.”

She says the biggest lesson she learnt over time was the importance of discipline. “After rebelling for many years as a child, I finally understood how important discipline is for children,” she shares, comparing it to placing a border around a young tree so it can grow straight and strong.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) remains Indian cinema’s longest-running film. As it turns 30, Kajol sums up the experience: “I worked with my friends and had a blast. I knew we were making a good film because the script was fantastic. We ate good food and travelled around Switzerland — it was like being on one long working holiday. Parts of it were ridiculous, like trying to drape a sari in a cowshed and rolling down a hill by mistake. 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.”

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 realize that we are at an international level, and we have to compete at that level; we’re not competing at a national level anymore.”