Anshuman Jha and wife Sierra Winters welcomed daughter Tara Jha Winters this March. It takes the actor a beat to comprehend that it’s going to be his first Father’s Day as a dad. “It’s a surreal feeling as I am myself like a child,” he quips, adding, “When I am with Tara, it feels that my heart is beating inside another body. I am enjoying changing her diapers and feeding her. I love kids and I prefer them and animals over human adults.”
The actor shares that he has a certain ideology of raising kids as he comes from a matriarchal family. “A mother carries a child inside for nine months, so fathers should do more when the child comes. It’s what my mother has taught me,” he says, adding that he is living a righteous life to set a “high benchmark” for Tara. “I don’t drink or smoke. I want to be the best example of what a man should be for Tara, so that when she sees red flags, she knows it’s not worth it. I don’t do anything in my life that normalises toxicity. Love should not be an excuse for toxicity,” he asserts.
The 39-year-old insists that not just a good father, but he is also ensuring to be a good husband. “The best thing I can do for my daughter is show how much I love her mother. Me and Sierra make sure that we don’t let our relationship slide. We keep having dates and our romantic moments,” he says.
Now that he is a father himself, Jha misses his own dad a bit more, who passed away in 2020. “Me and my father didn’t spend too much time together as he was mostly out for work. But I used to have the most open conversations with him about life. We had a mutual love for food, and I miss having meals with him the most,” he shares, revealing the soundest advice he received from him. “In one of our last conversations, he told me, ‘Marry a woman, only if you love and respect her mother because inherently, she will turn out like her mom’. A year later, I met Sierra, and I loved her mother so much,” he shares.
Jha’s next film is Hari Ka Om, which has been chosen to be the closing night film at Indisches Film Festival in Stuttgart, Germany on July 21. The film tells a father-son story, emphasising the need to say ‘I Love You’ to each other in the relationship. “I, unfortunately, didn’t have such a relationship with my father, that’s why this film is special. In a patriarchal society, men don’t express their emotions to each other much. I wish my father was around because I want to say much more to him than I could. When you feel like expressing love, you should say it because you never know when is the last time you are speaking to a person,” he ends.
