Imran Khan, whose father Anil Pal is a Bengali, has retained his mother Nuzhat’s
second name as a tribute to her
Most of us can be accused of being blind followers of tradition. We automatically take on our father’s second name and live with it all our lives, because tradition tells us so.
By those rules, Imran Khan should actually have been Imran Anil Pal. His father, Anil Pal, a Bengali, was a classmate of director Mansoor Khan, Imran’s mother’s brother at IIT Bombay.
Nuzhat (Imran’s mother) and Anil fell in love and got married. But when Imran was just about one and half, they divorced.
“Yes, my father’s name is Anil Pal and he is a Bengali. My parents separated when I was very young. I share an extremely cordial relationship with my father. In fact, when he is in town, he stays with us. Later, mom got married to Raj Zutshi but they are divorced now since over two years. I share a cordial relationship with him too. So it has always been mum and her side of the family during my childhood,” says Imran.
Today, Anil works as a senior manager at Yahoo in Silicon Valley, USA. It is said that Imran stayed with Anil for a while to finish high school in California and then got trained in filmmaking at New York. Imran, however, chose to retain his mother’s second name.
He says, “I use Khan because in a sense my mom has been a single parent to me. It has been my mother all the way and that’s the reason I am a Khan.”
Imran seems clearly comfortable with these few unalterable facts of his life. We perhaps need more of such steady, emancipated young lads amidst us.
s_shubha@dnaindia.net
