Sidharth spoke about growing up in a Delhi village called Chanderawal, known in the 1980s for its gangsters. He said his father was a boxer nicknamed “Billu Boxer” and worked as a hitman for the Delhi mafia. “When I was born, my mother told him, ‘Billu, we can’t raise him here,’” Sidharth recalled, explaining that his mother wanted to take him away from that violent world. His early life, however, remained far from safe.
Childhood Marked By Violence And Survival
Everything changed when he was about nine years old. “When I was around 9 years old, someone threw my father from the sixth floor in Rohini, Delhi,” he told host Siddharth Kannan. After the fall, his father was bedridden for five years, with rods all over his body. Sidharth’s mother then became the family’s pillar. “My mother started working. My mother would wake up at 5 or 6 a.m., carry my father to the bathroom by herself, clean him, bathe him, put him back on the bed, cook for us, send us to school, and then go to work, 9 kilometres away,” he said. She saved money by walking those kilometres instead of taking a rickshaw, even to buy a mutton bone soup for his father.
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Home Filled With Struggle And Fear
His mother worked her way up from a job that paid Rs 900 a month, handing out pamphlets, to owning an advertising agency within five or six years. Sidharth, however, said this only made his father feel worse. “My father was a very disturbed man. My mom created everything, but he couldn’t accept it. So he became very violent,” he shared. The violence was not limited to arguments. “He punched my mother and knocked out all her teeth in front of my eyes,” Sidharth said. Night after night, the family lived in terror. “We would be asleep, and my father would wear his boots and kick my mother in the stomach while she was sleeping,” he added. They kept the beatings hidden, even from neighbours and school friends.
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Despite the trauma, Sidharth never saw his father as a villain. “I have always considered my father a hero, even till his last days. No matter how much pain I’ve gone through, or whatever has happened in my life, he loved me a lot. I have never hated my father,” he said firmly. His father later died of cardiac arrest, closing a painful chapter, but one that continues to shape how Sidharth remembers his early life.