Highlights:
Bollywood actor Parineeti Chopra resumed work after giving birth to her son, Neer, whom she welcomed with politician Raghav Chadha in October 2025. In an exclusive interview with India Today, she recently opened up about the emotional struggle of returning to work and leaving her baby for the first time. The actor recently spoke about the experience in an interview with India Today, describing the first time she had to leave her baby after spending months at home following his birth.
“I remember the very first time that I had to leave my baby, and this was after many, many months of postpartum, being at home 24/7, day and night. When I left him for the first time, I don’t remember that flight to Bombay. I don’t remember it. I don’t know when I walked through the airport, boarded the flight, landed, reached home. I have no memory. I was only sobbing for three hours.”
Chopra was clear that she did not see the feeling as ordinary guilt.
“I thought I would never be able to work again. I would never be able to do anything again. It’s not guilt. It’s crippling physical pain that you feel leaving your baby. The baby’s fine. They’re nothing to do with your absence. The family’s fine. Everybody’s having a blast.”
Chopra's comments also touch on a larger conversation around working mothers and the expectations they face after having children. Chopra recalled being questioned about her baby when she was out working, raising a familiar question: why is a mother’s return to her own life sometimes treated as something that needs to be explained?
For actors, that question can be even more complicated. Film and television schedules are demanding, projects are planned well in advance, and being away for work is often part of the job. Motherhood does not necessarily change those professional expectations.
Chopra and Raghav Chadha married in September 2023 and welcomed their first child, a son named Neer, in October 2025. Chopra later revealed that she discovered she was pregnant while filming Shaque: Trust No One, her first web series.
The timing has given her latest project an added personal connection, although Shaque itself is a fictional story about motherhood. In the series, Chopra plays Anvita, a mother whose newborn daughter disappears from a hospital. She continues searching for her child years later, as the mystery begins to affect her understanding of the people around her and even herself.
The series was released on Netflix on September 24 and also stars Jennifer Winget, Soni Razdan, Anup Soni, Tahir Raj Bhasin, Sumeet Vyas, Harleen Sethi and Dhruv Choudhry.
Chopra’s comments come at a time when the idea of the “working mother” is still often accompanied by expectations about how much time a woman should spend at home. Her experience adds a more personal side to that conversation — not whether mothers should work, but what returning to work can feel like after becoming one.
For Chopra, the professional comeback has happened alongside a completely new chapter in her personal life. And perhaps that is the harder part of the transition: learning how to make space for both without feeling that one has to come at the expense of the other.
