Twinkle Khanna asked dad Rajesh Khanna why he had barred Dimple Kapadia from working after marriage: ‘Wanted mother for my children’

Also read – ‘Scared’ Dimple Kapadia apologised with folded hands when Rajesh Khanna snapped at her: ‘Ab tum mujhe sikhaogi?’

He continued, “Besides, if I knew at that moment that Bobby would prove her talent, I wouldn’t have stopped her. To curb talent is cruel. By the time I saw Bobby our first daughter was already born.” He said that he didn’t curb Tina Munim’s career when they lived together many years later. “I made a film for her. We acted in so many films together. She was not even that interested but I said, ‘Work, get it out of your system.’ I did not want to repeat the same mistake.”

Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia with their daughter Twinkle Khanna. (Photo: Express Archives)

In the mid-1990s, when Khanna had moved to New Delhi after his acting career declined, he emerged from obscurity to attend one of Twinkle’s launch events. Asked if had any advice for her as she took a plunge in the turbulent waters of Bollywood, he said, “She often asks me for advice, and I tell her that I had no godfather in the industry when I started out, and that she must find her own way as well. I told her not to seek advice from her mother as well, because if she asks her mother for advice, she’ll only get more confused.”

At an event in Jaipur, Dimple Kapadia had reflected on how Twinkle dealt with her separation from Khanna. She had said, “She’s an amazing child. She must have been all of seven or eight when I got separated. The kind of maturity… She was only wanting to take care of me, to see if I was okay, if everything was alright with me.”