The actor told Karan Johar she isn't interested in hiding the relationship anymore, and put a rough timeline on marriage too.
Janhvi Kapoor finally said it out loud. On the latest episode of Koffee With Karan 9, sitting across from Karan Johar alongside Varun Dhawan, she was asked point blank if she was officially dating Shikhar Pahariya. Her answer took one sentence: "Yeah, I am."
That's it, that's the confirmation fans and the gossip pages have been chasing for a while now.
What's more interesting is why she chose to say it now, on a show built for exactly this kind of reveal. Janhvi told Johar she's thought a lot about why celebrities get so cagey about their personal lives in the first place. "I don't want Nazar and I don't want to be overly explicit about what's happening in my personal life," she said, before adding the line that'll probably get clipped and shared the most: "I also don't think people give that much of a fuck for us to be like, 'Let's never let anyone know.'"
She went further, calling the whole culture of secrecy a bit tired. "I just think it's overrated to be like, 'Let no one ever know ever.' It's just kind of boring to be tiptoeing around, and it's not a big deal," she said.
Johar, never one to leave a confirmation half-finished, pushed on to marriage. Janhvi didn't dodge that either. "Not for another 2-3 years for sure," she said, putting a number on something she's never publicly addressed before.
For anyone catching up, Janhvi and Shikhar go back years, not months. Reports have placed their first meeting around when Janhvi was 15 or 16, with the two close through their teens before drifting apart around her 2018 debut. The relationship is said to have picked back up by 2022, and Shikhar has been a visible fixture in her life since, the two routinely spotted together even as neither confirmed anything on record.
Shikhar himself isn't from the film industry. He's an entrepreneur and a polo player, grandson of former Maharashtra chief minister Sushilkumar Shinde, and brother to actor Veer Pahariya. So this was never a co-star romance dressed up for a press cycle, it's a relationship that existed well outside the Bollywood machine before Janhvi decided to bring it inside it.
The same episode had Janhvi getting candid about other things too, including a six-kilo weight loss during a rough patch with Johar, which Varun Dhawan needled her about on air. But the Shikhar confirmation is the bit that's going to travel.
What happens next is simple enough. No wedding date, no ring reveal, just a three-word admission and a rough two-to-three-year window. For now, that's as official as it gets.
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.