Pankaj Tripathi teases his wife for being on her phone during his speech, and this sweetest unplanned moment went viral in no time on social media.
The 49-year-old actor has never been shy about talking up his 25-year love story with his wife Mridula, and he is just given fans another lovely little moment from their marriage.
In a video doing the rounds on Instagram, the Omkara actor is up on stage speaking at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne, while Mridula sits in the audience, clearly lost in her phone.
He notices, and rather than let it slide, he calls her out mid-speech – half joking, half genuinely curious.
“What are you continuously typing? I am staring at you. I am watching, are you not listening to me?” he says, which roughly translates to asking who she's texting so continuously, since his eyes keep drifting to her phone instead of her listening to him. He even asks if she's typing out everything he's saying.
Then it clicks, she was probably texting their daughter. So he tells her to pass on a message: her father’s programme has started.
From there, the religion actor turns it into something sweeter, telling the crowd he has been married to Mridula for 25 years and still finds himself watching her face while he talks, just to see how she reacts. The room reportedly burst out laughing at the whole exchange.
It’s not the first time Pankaj has spoken about what Mridula means to him. He has previously talked about the years between 2004 and 2010 when he earned nothing at all, and it was Mridula who kept the household running while he went door to door in Andheri looking for acting work. These days, he has joked, it’s directors who turn up outside his home instead.
Pankaj will next be seen back as Kaleen Bhaiya in Mirzapur: The Movieout 4 September.