Rajkummar Rao says his teachers ‘paid school fees for three years’ because family didn’t have the money: ‘Mother would ask relatives for help’

Rajkummar Rao opened up about experiencing financial struggles as a child, but praised his late mother for never letting him or his siblings feel it.

By: Entertainment Desk

New Delhi | August 23, 2024 11:11 AM IST

2 min read

Both Rajkummar Rao and Hansal Mehta won National Awards for Shahid.

Rajkummar opened up about his humble beginnings.

Actor Rajkummar Rao opened up about his humble beginnings, and said that while his family never struggled with poverty, there were years when his school teachers chipped in to pay his fees. Praising his mother for doing everything that she could to give him a regular upbringing, Rajkummar said that she would also sometimes borrow money from relatives when things got tight.

He appeared on Raj Shamani’s podcast, where he spoke about his youth in Gurgaon. Rajkummar said that he was a very popular kid, and always knew that he wanted to become an actor. “I grew up in a joint family, I have two older siblings. I had humble beginnings. I didn’t grow up with money, so that financial stress was always there. It wasn’t like we were dying of hunger, but we were just about scraping by.”

Also read – How Rajkummar Rao-Shraddha Kapoor’s Stree 2 success launched a PR war for credit: Whose Stree is it anyway?

Rajkummar said that his mother would never let him ‘feel’ the financial restrictions, and would invariably make every ‘arrangement’ so that they wouldn’t be left wanting for anything. “For schoolbooks and tuition fees, she’d ask our relatives for help sometimes. That’s how she raised us. There was a two or three-year period where school teachers paid our fees because there were three of us and there was no money for school fees. They didn’t want us to be taken out of school, so they chipped in for us.”

Rajkummar said that his siblings were excellent students, and that he was very talented in extra-curricular activities, so the teachers didn’t want to deny them a proper education. “But I had a fun childhood, I was always outdoors,” he said. Rajkummar lost his mother shortly after his initial success in the film industry, and lost his father in 2019. He said that he bonded with his dad after his mother’s passing, because he was largely unavailable in his youth. Rajkummar recently appeared in the biggest hit of his career, Stree 2, which has made over Rs 400 crore worldwide.

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