Prateik Smita Patil reveals a custody battle between Raj Babbar and Smita’s family followed his birth: ‘Kaun maa, kaun baap’

Prateik said that in his first film, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, he was credited as ‘Prateik Babbar’ but subsequently, he went with just ‘Prateik’ for a few years. “In my first film, my name was Prateik Babbar and then the devil got the better of me and I started thinking ‘Kaun hai maa? Kaun hai baap? (Who is mom? Who is dad?)’ Then I started thinking, ‘I don’t want to be Patil, I don’t want to be Babbar. I want to be just Prateik.’ For a few films, I was only Prateik because I was bitter about my parents. I was like, I don’t want to belong to them. They have only given me trauma my entire life. I don’t want to belong to them and then I continued with Prateik,” he said.

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Prateik now goes with ‘Prateik Smita Patil’ and shared that it was after a conversation with his wife Priya that he decided on this name. “I had to embrace that name, it makes me complete. Now, I am complete, I feel complete. Priya said ‘Prateik, you owe it to her, she gave her life for you, you owe that, you are her son’ and that hit different. I was like ‘this is who I have to be’,” he said.