Ali Fazal on fatherhood: `I spent the first few months very anxious`

Next month, Ali Fazal will bring romance on screen with Metro… In Dino. But in real life, love is an everyday affair for the actor, who has been discovering new meanings to the emotion after welcoming daughter Zuneyra Ida Fazal. His love story with actor and his wife Richa Chadha too has taken a new turn as they navigate parenthood together. “You’ll find me trying to flirt back with my wife, find new ways to get out. Once our daughter sleeps, we’re like, ‘Let’s grab a bite’. Or some mornings, we sit, have our coffees, and talk,” he smiles.

Fazal and Chadha became proud parents to Zuneyra last July. Since then, it has been a whirlwind of change — between burping duties and nappy changes, between feeling on top of the world and feeling exhausted, the actor says he has become “a different person”. “The definition of love has become different since parenthood,” he reflects, adding that he was an anxious father in the first few months since his daughter’s birth. “I probably read all the literature. I spent the first few months very anxious. Now it’s getting a little better.” 

But the new father’s worries haven’t ended. Often, he finds himself thinking of the world that his child is growing up in. “What’s the world we have in store for her? That scares me. The cinema that we create today, people will watch it 50 years later and abuse us. They will say, ‘You were alive in this era when this was happening. Did you record that? You didn’t.’ These thoughts bother us [Chadha and him].”

As an actor and a producer, Fazal not only tries to contribute to meaningful cinema, but also is a strong public voice for social dissent. His forthrightness hasn’t come without a cost. “It’s difficult to be an opinionated artiste in the industry. I’ve probably lost work because of that at times, but I don’t regret it. Sometimes, speaking out is not the only answer.” That’s where, he believes, the power of cinema lies. “We’ll make all kinds of cinema, but we have to be smart about it. We can’t wait for the right time to come. The best of things come out in tragic times. We have to crack how we can smartly make [what we want to say].”

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