Twinkle Khanna opens up about children Nitara and Aarav’s different skin tones: ‘These things exist in our country’

Twinkle Khanna, who was a popular film actor in the 1990s and is now known as an author, has two children – son Aarav and daughter Nitara – with her husband, actor Akshay Kumar. Twinkle, in an earlier chat with FICCI FLO, shared some parenting hacks and said that one tends to experiment more with their first-born as they are also learning what to do as a parent. Twinkle spoke about the difference in skin colour between her two children, and recalled an anecdote about her daughter that Twinkle saw as a moment of “triumph.”

Talking at the event, Twinkle shared, “I learnt a lot with my first child. And I think your first child tends to be that manual. You experiment a little bit on that child. With my second one, what I realised was that… I thought she looked like a normal Indian girl and there was always this comparison between her and her brother in skin colour or things like that. Things that exist in our country. And I decided that I am going to make sure that she believes she is absolutely wonderful, so if she has a unibrow, I told her that look you are as beautiful as Frida Kahlo, and she was as amazing and so are you. If she is brown, I would tell her that her skin is golden.”

ALSO READ | Inside the Kapoor family Christmas lunch: Raha cuddles with Alia Bhatt, Ranbir Kapoor poses with Neetu Kapoor and cousins

Story continues below this ad

One day, Nitara was going to the beach with her brother, but she refused to put any sunblock as she felt she did not need it. She then compared herself to a brown T-shirt and her brother to a white one, saying that a white T-shirt gets dirty but a brown one does not.

“So eventually, one day, I think my proudest moment was when she was sitting with her brother and we were going to the beach and he was putting on sunblock. She said ‘I don’t really need so much sunblock because my skin is greater than yours’. And she said a white T-shirt gets dirty but a brown T-shirt doesn’t. You can’t see it so I am greater. So I thought that was a triumph,” she said.

Twinkle welcomed her son Aarav in 2002 and daughter Nitara in 2012.