When Amitabh Bachchan reprimanded Abhishek Bachchan for not taking studies seriously: ‘Hum itna sangharsh karke paise kamate hain’

Actor Abhishek Bachchan recalled how his father, Amitabh Bachchan, once sourced his report card, despite Abhishek’s best attempts to keep it from him. Abhishek went to boarding school in Switzerland, and in an interview, recalled how he’d be scared of his father scolding him for poor grades.
Speaking to RJ Siddharth Kannan, Abhishek was asked if his parents had ever reprimanded him when he was a student. Abhishek replied, “Waat toh nahi lagayi, but baith ke samjhaya gaya hai ke beta dekho, hum itna sangharsh karke paise kamate hain, mehnat karke padha-likha rahe hain, iske yeh matlab nahi hai ke tum udhar masti karo (They never scolded me, but they’d calmly explain to me that they were working very hard to pay for my education, and that I shouldn’t waste my time). You have to be responsible.”

Abhishek added, “My father has never raised his hand on me, or his voice. And it wasn’t required. He would just need to have a firm tone and the whole household came to its senses.” He said that his mother, Jaya Bachchan, ‘tried’ to smack him a few times, but because he had a growth spurt, he was ‘out of reach’.
Recalling the plan he came up, he said he tried to hide his report card from his father. Abhishek said that he’d wait for the postman to arrive with it and then make sure that his father doesn’t see the report card until he’d already left for Switzerland for another term. But Abhishek’s plan didn’t work because the report card never came. One evening, he said, just before he was about to leave for the airport, his father called him up to his office on the house intercom. He’d sourced the report card himself. Abhishek said that he was ‘finished’. “How he managed to get that report card, I don’t know. He would read out the report card, and in the early 90s, he’d taken a bit of a sabbatical… He used to read aloud the comments, sitting on his desk in his study. Did he bribe the postman? Did he wake up before me? I had all these conspiracy theories.”
Abhishek will be seen next in Dasvi, which will be released on Netflix and JioCinema this Friday. In the film, he plays a politician who attempts to clear the 10th standard while in prison.