Thank you for asking this the way you did, genuinely. This is exactly the kind of question we'll always take the time to answer, because it's in good faith, and you've been fair enough to say the struggle was real. That's all curiosity ever needed to be.
The problem was never people being curious. It was the ones who chose to accuse and troll instead of ask, especially on something this sensitive. Your approach is the right one: "if this is true, then what about this interview?" That's a question. Attacking someone before knowing the full story isn't. There are always two sides.
So here's the fuller picture, on one timeline. Her father served in the army, in that old clip with the childhood photo, you can see just how little she was. After that, he took voluntary retirement and went into business. That business ran into a very heavy loss, and repaying that debt meant a brief but brutal stretch where nearly everything the family had went into clearing it. That is the phase she spoke about.
The "big house," the family home she's referred to, is exactly that: the family home back in her hometown, with far bigger rooms than the small one they moved into in Mumbai. Put all of it on a single timeline and it lines up. The "mismatch" only appears if you take older quotes in isolation and hold them against something she deliberately kept private until now.
And that's the heart of it. This was a secret. Something she chose not to speak about for years. The show's whole format is revealing secrets, and she found the courage to share hers. Not mentioning a painful chapter in old interviews isn't a contradiction. It's simply what holding a secret looks like.
A little logic, and a little grace. If it still doesn't fully add up for you, that's okay, you don't know her personally, and that's fair. But she isn't someone who would manufacture pain for a career or a show. If she were, she'd have used these stories long ago, in the very interviews everyone's pointing to. She didn't. That should tell you something. π€ #TeamShivangi
You're allowed to have a favourite. Everyone is. But turning someone's struggle and their secret into a weapon to prop up your fav? That's where it stops being support and becomes something ugly.
There was a time, growing up, when a business loss hit her family so hard that every rupee they had went into repaying it. She never said that was her whole life. It was a chapter. A brutal one, that she and her family lived through and fought their way out of.
That was the secret. Not a sob story. A truth. "I have seen those days. They weren't easy. And I worked to be where I am."
Some people can understand what that takes. Some may never. #TeamShivangi