4 minutes of readingChennaiFebruary 4, 2026 08:35 pm IST
From Bollywood bylanes to global domination, Priyanka Chopra has emerged and represented India on the world stage like only a few artists can do. The actor, who was born in Jharkhand and lived in Bareilly for several years, had just She was 17 years old when she won the Miss India title. However, before this, her parents had sent her to the United States when she was 13 to receive her education. When she returned home after living in the United States for a few years, she was a teenager who dressed and spoke like an American.
This became a problem as many children in Bareilly started following her whenever she went out. This led her parents to worry about her safety, and they even asked Priyanka to dress casually and stop wearing Western outfits.
‘The children started following us and placed iron bars after the boy jumped into the house’
In an old interaction with Teaching Retro, Priyanka’s mother Madhu Chopra spoke about the same. He recalls how they enrolled actress Dostana in a nun’s school in Bareilly after her return from the US and made sure she was picked up and dropped in a car so that they could keep her safe. But this did not stop the children from following her. “We put her in a convent school. We would pick her up and drop her off in the car because her father was strict and said you can’t go anywhere alone. The kids started following our car, so it started to become unsafe,” he said.
Things got serious when a boy jumped into Priyanka’s house, prompting her “overly protective” father, who “didn’t want any kind of trouble,” to put up iron fences around the house so that not even a monkey could enter. “One day, a boy jumped over our fence and entered our house. That was terrifying. The next day, his father covered the entire house with iron bars. From the boundary to the terrace… not even the monkeys could enter. That house is still the same,” he said.
‘Priyanka stopped wearing Western outfits’
Madhu and Ashok soon realized that their daughter was not meant for a small town and decided to move to a bigger city, possibly Delhi. “He said we were sending her to military school so she could move in with us,” he recalled. She added: “We were like chote sheher mein badi machhi (small fish in a big pond) and then you can’t let anyone come into your house and mess with you toh humara bhi todo rutba tha hello (we also had a good reputation).”
However, Priyanka’s parents not only tightened security around her; They also asked her to reevaluate her wardrobe and stop wearing Western clothes. Recalling how Priyanka completely changed her wardrobe after a serious conversation with her father, Madhu said, “I don’t know what conversation they had. The next day, she came back from school and said she wanted to go shopping. I took her and she selected such boring and drab clothes… all salwar kurtas. She selected colors like off-white, brown and beige to look dull,” she said, adding, “I don’t know what she said. She never told me and he didn’t tell me either, but “This was the reaction. After that, he no longer wore western clothes in Bareilly.”
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However, Priyanka did not stay in Bareilly for long. She applied for Miss India and soon moved to Bombay to participate in the contest. She went on to win Miss India and then Miss World 2000. She began her film career in 2002 with the Tamil film Thamizhan, in which she starred alongside Vijay. He made his debut in Hindi cinema with Sunny Deol’s The Hero: Love Story of a Spy and gained wide fame with his second Hindi film Andaaz, where he starred alongside Lara Dutta and Akshay Kumar.