Fashion designer and actor Masaba Gupta has spent her entire life in the limelight as she was born to celebrity parents Neena Gupta and Vivian Richards. While they never married, and in fact, her father continued living abroad during her childhood, Masaba remained in contact with him.
In a recent interaction with Twinkle Khanna on the Tweak India YouTube channel, Masaba said, “I was very grateful that I had what I had. Everyone tells me, ‘Oh you’ve become successful because of your mum and your dad’. Someone once apparently told a friend once that, ‘What does she have to do. Her dad left her hundreds of crores’. I said no, there’s no hundreds of crores. They are being built, but I am building that myself.”
She added, “But I never felt that it was a negative. I thought it was a positive, because I had such a great benchmark. I had two examples in my house on how great you can be and I always saw it like that.” She also spoke about finding refuge in sports, because she “grew up in isolation.” She shared how her father would bring her fashionable tennis dresses as she involved herself in the sport.
She said he always wanted her to become a sportsperson. However, Masaba called herself an “angry tennis player,” adding that she couldn’t continue after a point. “I think it was his dream to have me become a tennis star. And I was playing, I think I was number three in Maharashtra. That much I did with my anger issues. I did that much but no more than that,” she said. Masaba added, “In my head, I couldn’t talk myself out of it. And that’s what playing a sport like tennis is about, right? It’s what you play in isolation. You have to talk yourself out of every situation, every match point, everything you didn’t do on that court. I couldn’t do it.”