After acting in South and Bollywood films for nearly two decades, Shriya Saran decided to step away from the limelight when she conceived. The Haridwar-born star and her Russian husband Andrei Koscheev moved to Barcelona so she could enjoy her pregnancy, “get fat and not care what people wrote about her.’ Saran announced the ‘good news’ nine months after their daughter Radha’s birth, and by then she was back to her svelte self. The actor spoke to Neha Bhayana about how she lost the pregnancy weight and dealt with postpartum blues
Q. Radha turned three last month. Are you facing threenage tantrums? What’s your trick for getting her to listen to you?
We are seeing tantrums these days. I find that telling stories really works. If you preach or tell children ‘no, don’t do this’, they will not understand, but stories work. I just make up random tales about animals. For example, I talk about an elephant and bananas and about how the doctor came. It may make no sense, but they get distracted and go into that world. I notice if you ask the child, “Will you be happy if that happened to you?”, it does not help, but if you say, “What if the elephant did it differently, wouldn’t it be nicer?” then it kind of works.