When Kalki Koechlin gave birth to daughter Sappho in 2020, she wasn’t married but had been in a long-term relationship with Israeli musician Guy Hershberg. A few years later, the couple casually announced that they were now married and were raising their daughter in Goa. In a new interview, Kalki has opened up about announcing her pregnancy when she was pregnant as she shared that the term “out of wedlock” was thrown around a lot in front of her.
“It’s one of those things which I know isn’t a big deal. But for a lot of people, it is. When I got pregnant and wasn’t married, it was such a big deal! They were like, ‘how did you get pregnant out of wedlock!’ It’s a term used in the 18th century! What are you, in a Shakespeare play? I don’t understand it,” Kalki shared with Zoom. She added that she was living with Guy at the time and was quite shocked as to how people received her news.
“Yeah, I was living with my partner. We were together, we’d been together for years. We had a baby, it’s normal. That’s what happens. We do sleep together, by the way (laughs). We are living together, so it happens. I feel, we’re living these lies in society sometimes, where we pretend these things don’t happen. We have a huge population, right? So these things do happen,” she shared.
In the same chat, Kalki shared that while she did feel a bit fo pressure to get married, it never really overwhelmed her. Previously, she had been married to director Anurag Kashyap, but the couple divorce in 2015 after four years of marriage. “You feel that little bit of pressure from family when I was younger — get married! I don’t know, did I ever feel it strongly though? Not really,” said Kalki.
Recently, Neha Dhupia also recalled the time when she got pregnant with her first child, daughter Mehr, in 2017 while dating actor Angad Bedi. She called that phase “chaos,” and revealed that even her BFF Soha Ali Khan wasn’t invited to their quick, hush-hush wedding. However, Soha was the first to know that Neha was pregnant.
“They were the first ones to get to know that we were pregnant. Also, because we were eating in a restaurant and I fainted on Kunal Kemmu (Soha’s husband). The next morning, we met again and that’s when I told her that I was pregnant,” Neha recalled in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter India. Neha and Angad also became parents to a son — Guriq — in 2021.
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“You are also like… not married, you barely dated the guy. This information, no matter how unorthodox or orthodox you are, it’s just easier to share it with your friends, and friends who have just had a baby, as opposed to telling your parents. It’s a tough one to have,” added Dhupia. “You are always questioned, ‘Are you together because this happened, or you genuinely want to be together?’ It worked out well. There’s no other way I would want it,” she said.
