On Smita Patil's 30th death anniversary, son Prateik Babbar on the worst five years of his life and resurrecting himself with sobriety
Sanyukta Iyer (MUMBAI MIRROR; December 13, 2016)

He is making a debut, eight years after debuting. Making peace with a complicated family life, drug addiction and career flops. Prateik Babbar is an actor who is not giving up
Aastha Atray Banan (MID-DAY; April 24, 2016)

Prateik Babbar sits across the room from us at his public relations firm’s Andheri office, appearing like a debutant gingerly discussing his first film. He smiles shyly when our photographer calls out to him, talks softly, making an effort to leave a good impression. After all, he is trying to make a comeback.

For the last three years, Babbar, 29, hasn’t acted. Issaq, his last film released in 2013, a story of love in the time of sand mafia ravaged Benaras. It didn’t ring in well. Just like Ek Deewana Tha the year before, with actor and former girlfriend Amy Jackson. Professional setbacks have been only one of his headaches. Drug and alcohol addiction is the real bugbear.

He has been in and out of rehab multiple times. But now that he is celebrating a couple of months of being sober, the only way he sees himself getting back into the limelight is to tell the truth and hope for the best.

"For the last five years, only the substance mattered. Nobody else — family, friends — even came close. It was about running away from every kind of emotion. I was disgustingly addicted," he says straight-faced.

Babbar’s struggle was possibly scripted before his time. The only child to parallel cinema’s stars, Smita Patil and Raj Babbar, he was brought up by his maternal grandmother, Vidyatai Patil, and aunt, Manya Patil, after Smita passed away a month after his birth. Babbar was married to veteran theatre personality Nadira Zaheer Babbar with whom he had two children, when he met Smita. As a man in love with and married to two women, he led a complicated life. Its crushing burden on Smita, she once described as ‘private hell’. After her death in December 1986, Babbar returned to living with Nadira, who had accepted Smita in a strange ménage a troi arrangement, and their kids.

"My parents’ relationship always was a source of confusion. Why were things like this? If mom had just lived longer and dad would have spent more time with me…" he trails off before gripping the thought, "things could have been, actually, would have been, different."

Prateik grew up with grandparents grounded in nationalist ideology. Shivajirao Patil, one of Maharashtra's tallest leaders of the co-operative movement was member of the Rajya Sabha and twice elected to the Maharashtra Legislative Council. Vidya, too, was involved with the socialist movement. Manya, their youngest daughter, who has a degree in fashion from New York, has been Prateik’s custodian in a sense, both personally and while managing his career.

The Patils, says Prateik, were clear that Babbar was responsible for Smita’s pain. It didn’t help that he was hardly around, busy with acting and political commitments. "I was brought up believing he was the bad guy. They told me what he had done, and how my mother was lonely. So, I distanced myself from him."

Drugs seemed a convenient balm. His first brush with substance abuse was at 14. It was marijuana with friends. As he grew braver, he moved to miracle mood changers. Ganja remained a constant.

The other constant was a girlfriend. "It was about rebelling. With drugs, I also needed relationships. I thought if I didn’t have anyone with me, I’d fall apart."

Perhaps to prove that relationships and marriage can work, he wanted to wed every woman he dated, including Jackson. "At 14, I engraved a girl’s name on my hand with a lit cigarette. I am very careful about falling in love now," he says.

A stint at a rehab centre in Mumbai was followed by relentless counselling. Most psychotherapy experts arrived at one conclusion — he was trying to fill a void. "I never believed that, though. But it was true. It makes me glad then that in the last three years, I have stayed away from a relationship. The break gave me the chance to face my problems alone, even if I was facing them when high."

Babbar wanted to launch him in a film, but when he turned 25. Instead, Prateik joined Prahlad Kakkar’s production firm as assistant director. Kakkar, a friend of the family, even had firm named by Smita. "Dad kept saying, wait, but I didn’t want any of it. I was pushing everyone away."

The going solo obsession made him symbolically severe ties with his father. In 2011, he announced that he was now simply, Prateik. He said in an interview during promoting Dum Maaro Dum in 2011 that he regarded actor Abhishek Bachchan as his elder brother, prompting half-brother Aryan Babbar to blame him for "doing all kinds of things for publicity". "I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. After advertising, I auditioned for Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na."



The 2008 romantic comedy produced by Aamir Khan to launch his nephew Imran, had critics single out Prateik as ‘the guy to watch out for’. Unusually natural on screen for a debutant, he won a Filmfare for the role in 2008.

For a while, things seemed to be going well. But during Ekk Deewana Tha, love did him in. His co-star, British model-turned actress Amy Jackson, who’d once told a magazine, most girls would be "happy dating Prateik", grew tired of his obsessive ways and packed up. When she returned on work from England next, the intricate tattoo on her forearm, Mera Pyaar, Mera Prateik, was gone.

"I could be called a romantic, but it’s not a good love when you ignore yourself and make it all about the other person. I forgot I existed. I was jealous, possessive… crazy. Think of a bad adjective, and I have been all that in five years. I don’t blame her for leaving," he says.

And then, Vidyatai Patil passed away last year. The woman who turned mother again in her 60s to take care of a month-old baby, the grandmother who Prateik petitioned from Ajmer’s prestigious Mayo College so that he could return, pleading, I can’t live without you, was gone.

Prateik says he lost track of reality, right and wrong. Without her watchful support, he took to what made him feel better, drugs and alcohol. "I was back to relying on it. It was my number one priority."

He knew he had hit rock bottom again. He decided, he’d return to rehab. "In an attempt to tell the world to f*** off, I was hurting myself the most." He also had his anger to deal with. But isolated, he turned to his only parent.

"I looked at my father and realised, this is the only parent I have — my biological father. And I suddenly didn’t want to care about what happened, and what he did. I wanted to love him. I couldn’t let the past, something I have no control over, destroy me." And so began one more long walk to normalcy.

Called "spontaneous" for his acting by Vidyatai, Prateik, who famously quit Subhash Ghai’s acting school in a day, now keeps himself busy at The Jeff Goldberg Studio where he is learning method acting. "I have never trained in it. It’s proving to be cathartic; to play a character different from who I am is helping me cope."

He has built a bridge to Nadira and the kids, calling their relationship "a hundred per cent normal". "I go and hang with them at home all the time".

Second chances don’t come easy. His day now starts at the gym, followed by class, meeting people and auditioning. "It’s not going to happen overnight. People will be wary, but I am positive that good things happen. I have to keep at it. Keep calling, keep reminding others that I’m here. There is no other life for me. This is what I do."

A few happy things have happened. He shot a commercial with MS Dhoni, recently starred in Aatish Dabral’s The Guitar, and his crossover movie, Umrika, which has done well on the festival circuit, will release later in the year.

Kept away from films and the industry when growing up, he knows his talent is inherited. As is his pull towards the gritty, indie scene. "I know! I keep thinking about that. It’s her [Smita] genes, and my father’s. A freaky coincidence, right?"

But complete redemption is still some time away. Coming clean on addiction in an industry famously expert at running for cover, is his way of standing out. "I want to say, yes, I was bad. Now, I want to be good, and do good. I hope it doesn’t backfire."

Tushar Joshi (DNA; October 19, 2015)


Your mom would have been 60 this year...
Yes. It’s been 29 years since my mom passed away; just two weeks after she gave birth to me. She would have been 60 on October 17. Besides being with her in heart, mind and spirit, my family and I try to spend as much time together remembering how magical a person she was. We talk about all the love and appreciation she had for everyone and all the love and appreciation she got back from all the people in her life. Her relationships with her filmmakers, colleagues, co-stars, producers and fans, was all organic, pure and beautiful. It was true and unconditional. I feel blessed that even 29 years after her passing, the world still wants to remember my mother and celebrate her life and achievements. So in her memory, this year, we released a book called Smita Patil: A Brief Incandescence. Mr Bachchan was kind enough to grace the occasion and release the book. Another special occasion was me speaking at the Mumbai University about my mother and how her being such an icon and legendary woman, has affected and moulded me into the person I am today.

Even though you barely spent any time together, you seem very connected to her.
I am connected to her. But unfortunately, the connect has never been through human touch or spending time together or being a family together. It was always through her films and photographs, stories from family, her friends and people she worked with. I feel I also have a huge connect with her as a performer and an actor. I like to study her style of performance and acting. In my opinion, she was a very simple actor but her performances were layered and had immense depth. That is also what I am looking for in myself as an actor and performer. But we connect on extraordinary love...cosmic love!

Do people tell you that you are like your mom?
People say I look like both my parents. Hey, I am not complaining! They were both very good-looking people when they were at the peaks of their career. I still feel they are very beautiful.

Is your relationship with your dad different now than it was five years ago?
I was raised by my mother’s parents, my father had another family to look after. I would see him, but not very often. I was kept away from the film industry, too. My grandmother did it to avoid all the drama, I suppose. Initially, there wasn’t a bond where I felt like I could go see him whenever I wanted, it wasn’t something I felt naturally about, it wasn’t organic. He wasn’t someone I could cry to earlier, as the years passed and I grew older and a little wiser I understood that he is the only biological parent I have left and I wanted to establish a connect. I wanted us to bond, I wanted us to love each other and that’s what we have now, love respect and admiration for each other.

You recently lost your grandmother. How are you coping?
My grandmother is and always will be my real mother. Smita is my reel mother! Just kidding! Smita is as real as on can get, but my grandmother Vidya is and always will be my number one. When I was a child I thought she would always be there, I thought she would never grow old, so yes it was a shock. But the whole family saw it coming, she got bed ridden and stopped walking and communicating. Though we were prepared for it, I still can’t believe she isn’t around. I miss her every single day. If I am half a decent and respectful man today it is only because of her. She will always be the driving force of my life.

Did you see it coming? And prepare yourself mentally?
Once she got bed ridden, we knew it was going to be only downhill from there. All we could do was to spend as much time with her as we could.

One thing that you will always remember her for?
Her being a disciplinarian.

What you will miss most about her?
She used to hate the way I dressed. My torn jeans with my boxers hanging loose. She always said now that you are making some money why don’t you buy clothes that are not torn? Brush your teeth thrice a day, shower twice, wash your hands before every meal, don’t drink water between meals, don’t smoke cigarettes, and drive the car slow. Last but not the least she said if you buy a bike I will never forgive you! That’s something that I am battling with till date... I love bikes!

She was the one constant in your life. How has your life changed after her?
I still believe she’s alive and still approach life like she’s living next door. I wake up every morning wanting to go meet her every evening after a day’s work trying to make something of myself, proud to tell her and make her proud just to see a smile on her face. Even my 92-year-old grandfather for that matter, I want to reach out to people through good cinema like my mother did and come home to my grandparents to tell them about how I want to be like my mother and make them proud the way she did. She will still remain constant just invisible but not inaudible, I will still speak to her through photographs like I have with my mother for my entire life. Sure I do feel the void and it does hurt and it always will. But my head is stuck on making her proud and that’s what I want to do.

She was your support system. Who do you see fulfilling that role in your life now?
I can fall back on everybody close to me in my family. My father, my aunts, my grandfather, Aarya, Juhi, their mother, but I want to be strong enough to be my own support system. I know its hard to even think of or easy to say, or maybe over ambitious even, but it’s the way I want to be and I am working on it.

What’s happening on the career front?
A film I worked on called Umrika directed by Prashant Nair also stars Life of Pi’s Suraj Sharma, we play brothers in the film. It won some rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in January early this year and releases in India early next year. I am looking forward to what you guys think. It’s an art house film, my mothers favourite genre!