Celeb siblings: torn apart

Why do the progeny of celebrities, or the latecomeers among celeb siblings, have a hard time keeping up with the legacies of their more famous relatives?

You really can't keep a good man, or woman, down. But sometimes in showbiz, you could've a helluva time holding your own if you are the offspring of a legend—or the sibling of one.
That's what happened to Mahatma Gandhi's son, Harilal. It's the classic story of parental tyranny, imposed inadvertently by the parent's celebrity status.

We'll soon see Akshaye Khanna in Feroz Khan's Mahatma Versus Gandhi as the rebellious Harilal, who spent his entire life living with a legend who was a father to the nation, but had no time for his son.

It's easy for a child in a family headed by a celebrity to turn self-destructively defiant. Fortunately, both of Randhir Kapoor and Babita's daughters turned out just fine.

Karishma and Kareena Kapoor are as different from one another as they are from their parents. "We never made an effort to be different from another. We were just born that way. It's not as though we sat down for a meeting and decided, 'You be this way, I'll be that.' Our personalities just happened to be different," laughs Kareena.

But it can't be just a coincidence. Siblings in showbiz have always been poles apart. If the sibling is a clone (Kajol's Tanissha or Malaika Arora's Amrita), the one who came later can end up in obscurity.

Can you even think of David Dhawan and TV actor Anil Dhawan as brothers? Or Suneel Darshan and Dharmesh Darshan—the one is gregarious and media-friendly, the other doesn't even carry a cellphone. Or Shabana Azmi and her sibling, Baba? They represent the archetypal extrovert-introvert syndrome: Sunny and Bobby Deol—the former, the elder brother, is painfully introverted, and while the younger one isn't quite the epitome of extroversion, he is friendly and easygoing. Or, for that matter, Anu Malik and Abu Malik—the former arranges songs, the latter stopped trying and started arranging star concerts instead. Then, there are Farha and Tabu, Raima and Riya Sen….

Why is the sibling always reclusive, if not entirely inaccessible to public attention? Asha Bhosle has the answer. In a remarkably forthright moment, she once told me what it meant to try to emerge from the indomitable Lata Mangeshkar's shadows.

Asha always knew it would be futile to try to be another Lata Mangeshkar. So, she took the opposite route. "If Didi's forte was melodies, I made rhythmic Westernised songs my forte. And never mind if all the heroines' songs went to Didi. There was always that one song where I got noticed, even if it was tucked at the back of the album."

A terrifying thought: What if Asha had chosen to follow Lata's pattern of singing?
Forget a cakewalk—having a star sibling is nothing short of an "ache-walk". Ask Aamir's kid-brother Faizal, or Manisha's baby brother Sidharth. Has anyone thought of what it must be like to be constantly reminded in the shadows that the territory of the tangible is unobtainable, to be forever expected to perform and excel as effectively as the star of the family?

Right now, Hema Malini's younger daughter is going through the same turmoil. The burden that the two sisters carry on their frail shoulders is unbelievable—superstar dad, superstar mom, and star-siblings Sunny and Bobby. Esha was constantly compared with them, and found to be lagging behind.

Fortunately, before Esha could get ultra-defensive about her space in life, success came her way. Now it's Ahana's turn. The constant questions about her future are getting to her. "Why does everyone keep asking my mom what I plan to do with my life? How can she answer when I don't know? I don't have to say anything. But my mom is being made constantly answerable," says Ahana, disturbed.

The girl is discovering herself at the moment. Like all the people her age, Ahana is trying to find her bearings in life. She doesn't want to commit in print or on television about her future—because she doesn't know it herself.

Is that a crime? It isn't easy for a teenager to be informed on news channels that she'll be directing films when Ahana herself has made no such decision.

Her acute embarrassment at being made a spokesperson for her parent's luscious legacy is symptomatic of the pressures that celeb's siblings and offsprings are often subjected to. Sometimes they just cave in, go adrift like Mahatma Gandhi's Harilal or Marlon Brando's son, Christian, who killed his sister Cheyenne's boyfriend Drag Drollet in Brando's famous Mulholland Drive home in 1990, which act probably led to Cheyenne killing herself five years later.

The more fortunate progenies or siblings find an escape route, seeking out a way of dealing with the celebrity status that they've inherited.

Thank heavens that Amitabh Bachchan's brother, the controversial Ajitabh, never aspired to be an actor, and the Big B's daughter, Shweta, chose to stay away from the arclights. As Bachchan tells it, she defied him and just got married instead.

Not every celeb's sibling is as lucky as Asha Bhosle.