Darsheel Safary’s grandma became paranoid he’d be kidnapped after Taare Zameen Par, says his life became chaotic: ‘It was scary’

“Once you’re an actor, an invisible wall shapes around you,” he said. “This wall comes between friends, and also family. That’s why actors seem distant… I feel the wall. People pause before approaching you.” Darsheel said that after the movie came out, he went to school and was mobbed. “Friends changed, new friends came, seniors would come and talk to me. It became chaotic in an unpredictable way. I couldn’t understand what was happening. I couldn’t go play cricket in the gully under my house; I never realised it would be my last time. At school, I was mobbed. My entire ground floor, the full first floor, and second floor, and third floor was filling up with kids just to see me. I couldn’t go to the canteen,” he said, even though he’d been given Rs 5 extra as allowance by his mother that day.

But the scariest aspect was how his grandmother reacted to his sudden fame. “My dadi would tell dad, ‘Protect the kid’, as if my life was in danger. I would always run away from that conversation, I didn’t want to be a part of it. I wanted to be a free person, and now they were talking about kidnapping, it was scary. Mobs would form, people would pull me, it was actually scary.” Darsheel said that his mother still checks on him every hour, because that fear is so ingrained.