By B. Suryanarayanan
Inside Edge and One Night Stand actor Tanuj Virwani has opened up about how going public about his relationship with Akshara Hassan ended up backfiring, splitting the lovebirds’ hearts. The flashy message of their break-up hit headlines for all the wrong reasons, the primary attributed to the actor’s hand behind the disaster, sending the tabloids with their pens jolting down.
Tanuj had been reportedly dating actor Kamal Hassan’s and Sarika’s daughter for four years until he decided to make it public. Veteran actress Rati Agnihotri’s son has confessed now that no matter how ‘going public’ might come off romantic, and might have worked for many celebrities in the past with the papers gushing at the hush-hush affairs finding the light, it ‘just didn’t strike right’ for him.
Speaking about the relationship he shared with Akshara, he called her a ‘lovely, lively girl full of vim and spirits’ and labelled it one of the reasons that drew him towards her.
‘I met Akshara on an outdoor shoot at Kullu Manali with her mother, veteran actress Sarika.’, he added. ‘From then on, we continued to date until we realised that things weren’t working out the way we wanted to be and decided to part on mutual terms without much drama.’
He feels that one of the greatest things that went wrong in their connection that believed in honesty, and not shying away from the cameras ready to hound them over and out was making their relationship public, for he strongly believes it to be one of the reasons why the attempts backfired, and the paparazzi found it adequate to dig around history to draw him out when Akshara’s private pictures made up the ‘trends of the day’ in 2018, approximately an year after they parted away as friends for life.
‘Now I realise that we must never make our relationships public, and let our work do the jobs for us.’
The actress was a victim of cyber-bullying in 2018 all due credits to her private pictures and the internet found it best to hound her ex, and many surrounding her. He admitted to having her private pictures in 2013, but added that he deleted it sooner, and came out that ‘he didn’t have much knowledge about the technology that surrounded about how pictures in the mobile get stored in internet’ and wished that the real culprits be caught.
However, things started getting awkward as his name constantly saw getting into the spotlight, and he accepts getting assuaged after his Akshu spoke out to him that she was confident about him not doing it either.
Except, their relationship getting public long before their break-up only gave Akshara cold feet, and she decided to stay mum with no signal from either side, which made more to prompt that Tanuj was the hand behind the leak for revenge. He also reveals that he was mad at Akshara for not standing up for him. ‘She didn’t say I did it, but she didn’t say I didn’t do it either.’
This, he adds had put a lot of ‘pressure’ on his work life, plussing with the constant worry that all that the papers threw up might affect his work life, having already damaged his friendship with Akshara.
He believes there might have been many reasons for her to have been mum, but he strongly believes that going public could have been one of the reasons for her silence. He went on to add that had she spoken up, it would have cleared the nasty air that succeeded it. But had they kept their connection the way it had to be kept, a private affair, then none of these would have actually happened, and Akshara and him would have remained strangers to the social life, with no ugly links, and crazy backstories.
He concluded with a sad nod of his head as he talked about how he had moved on, and started seeing different women, but he revealed in the end that ‘some matters of secrecy deserve time and about, and may be better if they were kept private.’
On the work front, Tanuj was last seen in Hotstar originals Murder Meri Jaan with Barkha Singh, and the hype and word of mouth has it that the series is good, and creative. Before that, he starred in Code-M opposite Jennifer Winget, and made a cameo in the Netflix film Masaba Masaba. It must be noted that the actor also assisted Akshara’s father, and actor turned politician Kamal Hassan with his film Sabaash Naidu.