Over the past year, singer-actress Saba Azad has been in news as much for her work as for her personal life. The actress has been part of a successful show in Rocket Boys and has been performing as part of her musical group Madboy/Mink. But apart from all this, there has been the constant press about her relationship with Hrithik Roshan, which has dominated social media and the airwaves. In an exclusive chat with DNA, the actress talks about the ‘chatter’ around her personal life overwhelming her and how she made her peace with it.
Saba and Hrithik were first spotted together in January 2022 when they stepped out for a lunch date in Mumbai. Soon enough, they were photographed together by the paparazzi frequently. While they have never spoken about their relationship publicly, they made it Insta-official last year as well. Hrithik’s stature has meant that eyeballs have followed them wherever they go and whatever they do. Ask her about how she deals with the constant news articles, paparazzi pictures, and social media chatter about her personal life and Saba says, “Contrary to popular belief, life is not on social media. Life is elsewhere and it continues on elsewhere. My work carries on. I go to work and come back home. That is not affected by chatter, by articles, or by anything. If I let that get to me or invade my mind, then the only person suffering is me.”
The actress says that she is able to adopt a ‘live and let live’ attitude about all this because she sees the journalists and paparazzi as just people like her. “People are doing their jobs. For somebody, clicking photographs and selling them to a publication is a means of livelihood. They are doing their job and I’m doing mine by being indifferent. They are a cog in the wheel just the way I am,” Saba says.
Saba does admit that she got overwhelmed by it all initially when the madness began. “It’s very easy to get overwhelmed and I will be honest, in the beginning, I was overwhelmed. I am an extremely private person,” she says. However, she adds that once she saw there was no malicious intent to any of it, she was able to carry on. “I understood that none of this is meant as an offence. At the end of the day, everyone is trying to do their job and trying to get by the way I am. Once I made peace with that, I was able to say ‘you do your job and I’ll do mine’,” she sums up.
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Saba will be seen next in the second season of Sony Liv’s Rocket Boys, where she will reprise the character of Parvana Irani aka Pipsy, the companion of Homi J Bhabha (played by Jim Sarbh). The show, which also stars Ishwak Singh, Regina Cassandra, and Dibyendu Bhattacharya, streams on March 16.
