How BR Chopra’s Mahabharat played Cupid for interfaith Bollywood couple: ‘She was from a strict Telugu community…’

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Daboo said that Jyothi “had a singular focus” through these years: her family, her children, and her husband. He then proceeded to narrate their ‘amazing love story’. He said, “It was my final year of college, and I had a six-month gap to prepare for my exams. I was still going to college because I had been signed on to a play. We would use the girl’s common room as a rehearsal hall after hours, after getting special permission. My fellow actors were Vipul Amrutlal Shah and Aatish Kapadia. During one of those rehearsals, one girl entered and was surprised to see a bunch of people. One look at her, and I was floored. I knew that this was the girl I was going to marry; I told my friends immediately.”

Daboo’s friends told him that the girl he’d been struck by received 100 roses on Valentine’s Day. “I never tried to reach out to her, I never tried to find out more about her, or even where she lived. We exchanged that one glance, and it was done. Months went by, and Jyothi somehow found her way to me. She asked my friend JD Majethia, and found out who I was. She met me, and introduced herself. The shocking thing is, I immediately asked her to marry me. I was 19, and she was 15,” he added.

Daboo expressed surprise at how things progressed between then, as he addressed the setbacks they experienced. “We didn’t have a courtship, we didn’t even have a romance. We weren’t even friends. But we were in love. She said yes, based on nothing but one look. We dated for five years, and during that time, I realised that I was from a different community, and she was from a very strict Telugu community. It was impossible for us to get married, but by that time, we had fallen in love, and there was no way that we could separate,” he said.

Jyothi didn’t want to elope, nor did she want to marry someone against her parents’ wishes, Daboo said, adding, “As destiny would have it, my show Mahabharat would get a lot of re-runs during that time, and my role as Devrath was liked. Somehow, my father-in-law came across it, and he asked to meet me. He told me that I was such a good-looking and talented man, I should be focusing on my career, and my response was, ‘I don’t want anything in life other than Jyothi’. It was quite a dramatic statement to make, but it convinced him. We tied the knot in 1989.”

He said that he has been extremely lucky to have found a partner who stuck by him through thick and thin, and didn’t give up on him even when he was being difficult or making mistakes in life. Daboo’s career as an actor failed to take off, and his subsequent career pivot to music composition also didn’t reach the level of success that he hoped. But his sons, Amaal and Armaan, have established themselves in the Hindi film industry, and Daboo said that a lot of their success is a result of his wife’s determination. In recent interviews, Amaal has expressed his disappointment in his mother; he said that he was forced to sever ties with his parents because of the pressure they were putting him in. But they later made up, although Amaal maintained that he is closer to his father.