This article first appeared in theSun Buzz edition HERE
Priyanka Chopra Jonas reminisces about the time her fellow colleague Hrithik Roshan helped her late father Dr Ashok Chopra who was diagnosed with cancer.
In her recently released memoir titled Unfinished, Priyanka shared that Hrithik Roshan did everything he could to get the best treatment for Dr Chopra.
Hrithik managed to get them to London immediately where Dr Chopra could receive the best medical care. The actor made calls to his connections in Air India and booked a flight for them.
An excerpt from the memoir reads:
“Incredibly, Hrithik who is hugely successful in the Hindi film industry got on the phone and used his connections at Air India to arrange for my father’s immediate flight to London.”
“If we hadn’t had people around us who were so kind and so willing to act on our behalf - Hrithik and his father, Rakesh Sir, our family in Boston - I doubt that my father would have made it. There’s no way I can ever express my gratitude adequately to them, but it is deep and it is enduring,“ she wrote in the book.
However, her father passed in 2013 and the actress wrote how heartbroken she was. As such, the memoir is dedicated to her dad.
During the launch of Unfinished, Priyanka read out the dedication, “Dear Papa, much like the title of this book, your story was unfinished. With that in mind, I dedicate the rest of mine to you. I miss you, dad.”
She also attributed her father’s strict rule which has kept her safe from the dangers of Bollywood when she was breaking out in the industry.
Her father was adamant that there will be no night time meetings and “nothing after sundown.”
Priyanka admitted she didn’t understand the reasoning then. But as she has grown up, she appreciated her father for upholding his non-negotiable rule.
“At that time, of course, I didn’t understand it. Whenever I questioned the rule, he’d stand firm: ‘All meetings will be in the daytime, when you’ll be in the presence of either Mom or me.”
“Clearly my father was smart to fear the big bad world of entertainment, which his teenage daughter was so naively heading into,“ she added.
“While I did feel saddened and frustrated by the patriarchy and favouritism of the Bollywood system, I never felt physically threatened during my rise in it, and I attribute that to a combination of luck - bad things can do happen in broad daylight, all the time, with people close by in the next room - and my father’s wisdom.”
