Celeb teen Ahaan Panday, nephew of Bollywood actor Chunky Panday, says his social media popularity doesn’t depend on Aryan Khan and other famous pals
Aryan and I laugh, when we hear that people think we look alike. He is like, ‘Dude, that’s not true’,” says Ahaan Panday, 18.
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We are meeting celebrity fitness trainer Deanne Panday and her entrepreneur-husband Chikki’s son at their sprawling Khar bungalow on a weekday evening. That his paternal grandparents were Mumbai’s most successful doctor pair and that his actor uncle Chunky Pandey made a name for his wit, means that he keeps privileged company. Shah Rukh and Gauri Khan’s children, Aryan and Suhana, are close buddies. Aryan and he are also often confused for each other.
“Maybe, it’s the way we dress, or our hair and height. We all pose the same way too, na? Narrowed eyes, pouts... I smile more [than him]; he’s (Aryan) the more serious one. But we are totally different,” he says. What perhaps strings the two is that they belong to the young Bollywood set that’s taken over the imagination of social media users.
They Instagram and Snapchat, and they don’t bother with filtering out too much. That’s starkly different from how their superstar parents prefer to guard their privacy. Not just Ahaan and Aryan, Navya Naveli (Amitabh Bachchan’s granddaughter), Jhanvi Kapoor (Sridevi and Boney’s daughter) and Aalia Ebrahim (Pooja Bedi’s daughter) are making what they do public, and don’t care who thinks what of them.
Ahaan gets up from the conversation to pose for the photographer. He is confident, although he whines for a moment about “not having done my hair!” He’s tall, lean, and carries off a mop that’s all the rage right now. His smile is disarming.
We are curious if his friends ever sit and laugh over the brouhaha about them in the media. “We rarely talk about it. Because life is more than that. Instead, we watch a film or a TV show together.” Aryan, he says, unlike him, doesn’t have a public Instagram account. “He doesn’t entertain follow requests,” Ahaan grins. He admits he loves the attention, though. “I won’t want it another way.”
Suggest that he might have developed a fan following because of the people that find themselves into his pictures, and he shrugs. “See, when actor Ranveer Singh, who I love, came on the scene, everyone called him Deepika’s (Padukone) boyfriend. But he proved everyone wrong. Now it’s Deepika and Ranveer. Your followers won’t stay your followers just because you are friends with someone. They stay for you.” He knows what he is talking about, you realise. He has 76,000 Insta followers without having done a single film.
Which brings us to his career of choice. He chose not to study filmmaking in London, and instead takes acting classes in Mumbai. He says he is busy writing and making short films for his production company, Elysian Entertainment. The rest of the time is spent gathering “lovers and haters” on social media. We ask him about his friend Aalia Ebrahim’s Instagram account, and he smiles. She is often seen posing suggestively and is living life, a la Kardashian. “Aalia is a great friend and I am sure some people say, why are you putting this out there. But she is just being herself, and that’s what matters,” he says. “As far as privacy goes, I think it depends on you. Personally, I draw the line at not putting up any pictures of my famous uncle (Chunky Panday).” Seeing us surprised, he laughs before continuing, “My parents have nothing to do with being famous really. They are both low key. My mom obviously wants me to be a celebrity, but dad is the opposite, so they keep me grounded.” Then he comes back to the Chunky incident and his tone grows serious. “So, when I first joined Instagram last year, I made a filmy video of myself lip syncing to Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and overnight I had 10,000 followers. Since then, it has grown slowly. Then I put up one picture with my uncle, and suddenly it became about ‘he has so many followers because of his uncle’. I pulled the picture down.”
The downside of being a social media star is that you are easily recognised. That’s why when he hangs with his famous pals, it’s usually indoors. “I am very strict about being an actor. I want to reach a point where I am coming home crying, tired. That’s when I know I am successful and working hard.”
Not bothering to choose his words carefully, he calls himself a “grabber”. “Nandita Mahtani (designer) wanted my sister, Alanna, to walk the ramp for her collection recently. But my sister wasn’t here. I overheard and told mom, ‘I have to do this!’, he says. They made him wear a suit with no shirt, and that was odd because “it’s not like I have a great body”. But once he was walking the ramp, he spontaneously shed the jacket, and posed. “I was in my element, and I loved it.”
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