Mumbai: Veteran actor Randhir Kapoor said due to the prevalent paparazzi culture he wakes up to see pictures of his one-year-old grandson Taimur Ali Khan in newspapers everyday. Taimur, son of Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor, has become a paparazzi staple.
Asked if normalcy has been robbed off the childhood of celebrity kids due to media attention, Randhir said, “Certainly, it has been robbed. Everyday, I get up in the morning and I see a picture of my grandson in newspapers. Now everyone recognises his maid also! That’s because of the paparazzi.”
The senior actor, along with brothers Rishi Kapoor and Rajiv Kapoor, was speaking at a panel discussion last night during ‘Raj Kapoor Awards for Excellence in Entertainment’. The session was moderated by journalist Shekhar Gupta. “The media has created this. Now you have the ‘airport look’ and ‘gym look’ also,” Randhir said.
To this, Rishi quipped, “There is a ‘chautha look’ too. You go to a funereal and everyone is like ‘look at his shade, the glasses’.” When Gupta joked that he had not seen any of them in gym looks, Rajiv Kapoor said, “If we do that, the gym will stop functioning.” At the event, veteran filmmaker Ramesh Sippy, who directed “Sholay”, was conferred the first ‘Raj Kapoor Award for Excellence in Cinema’.
During the panel discussion, Sippy asked the three Kapoor brothers about growing up with an illustrious father, uncles and grandfather. Rishi said their growing up years—despite being the children of Raj Kapoor and the grandchildren of Prithviraj Kapoor—were absolutely normal.
“We were brought up as normal children, never allowed to go to the studio. Probably on Saturdays and Sundays, we would go and watch a shoot, that too our father’s, but otherwise we were never allowed,” he said. “We knew that our father was an important, big man. Wherever we went, people saw us, gave us a table in the restaurant, so there was something about our father but we didn’t know he was a star…We knew he was an important man, that’s it. Nothing beyond that,” he added.
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