‘People aren’t really looking for help. They just want to feel like they are not alone’

In the book, Sidhartha Mallya talks about being in court with his father, Vijay Mallya, in the UK. Pic/Getty Images

Minutes into the video call, our interviewee tells us how the media has hardly ever got his name right. His friends and acquaintances call him Sid. Everyone else knows him as Siddharth Mallya, son of businessman and ex-chairman of United Spirits, Vijay Mallya. "[But,] I'm Sidhartha," he shares, stressing on the final letter of his name. "That's how it has always been. I really don't know when they [media] changed it."

It is late evening in Los Angeles, when we catch up with the 34-year-old, who is currently pursuing a career in acting there, after moving away from the family business in 2012. We've been trying to jog our memory, thinking of his last public appearance in India. He admits it has been years. Once a regular face on Mumbai's party circuit, Sidhartha now prefers the quiet life: He wakes up before dawn, meditates, heads out for a walk, often with his dog, and then hits the gym, before going for acting class. He hasn't had a sip of alcohol in three years - the irony that he belongs to a family that has been one of the biggest producers of alcohol in the world, is not on lost on him. The change in lifestyle, however, was spurred by his own mental health journey. Sidhartha suffered through depression in 2016 and was also diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), a condition he realised he had been living with all along.

Sidhartha Mallya

"On the first year anniversary of when I stopped drinking, which was 2019, I remember putting up a brief post on Instagram [speaking about that journey]. I had thousands of people respond to it, saying they could relate to everything that I was sharing. I didn't expect a response like that. What I had done was just be honest and open. I realised that maybe I could continue talking about the other things I was going through," says Sidhartha, who made his feature film debut in Netflix original Brahman Naman.

In 2020, when the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sidhartha finally decided to kick-start his new online series, ConSIDer This, where he not only spoke about mental issues he struggled with, but also how one could deal with similar challenges. "I always felt this duty to continue doing whatever I could to shine the light on the issue."

That's how his just released book, If I'm Honest: A Memoir of My Mental Health Journey (Westland), was born. "This is not a self-help book," he assures, adding, "…I am not a Deepak Chopra or Jay Shetty [to write one]." "A lot of times, people aren't really looking for help. They just want to feel like they are not alone, and for me, sharing my story, and having one other person resonate with it, meant something."

He chose against having a ghost writer, because he wasn't comfortable having someone else tell his story, and in their words. This meant rethinking how he would write this book. "What I did was that I almost interviewed myself. I'd walk around with my phone and notepad, and every time something would come to me, I'd write it down on my phone."

Incidentally, Sidhartha has consciously refrained from name dropping in the book - he doesn't reveal the identities of his parents, extended family, friends and even girlfriends, because this memoir, he says, isn't about them "as much as how they were players in the broader picture". And yet, it's his parents' divorce, and the subsequent legal soup that his father found himself in, after his airline Kingfisher Airlines Ltd, ran into trouble, which are at the heart of his story.

As a child, Sidhartha remembers battling through feelings of loneliness, guilt and abandonment, after Mallya started a new life with his other family, often misdirecting his anger at his mum. "I was holding on to a lot of resentment and anger for a number of years without even being aware of it myself," he admits. "But when I started working on myself, I began to gain a certain level of empathy for my dad and everyone else. [Sometimes] it helps to see things from other people's perspective."

In July this year, Mallya, who left India for the UK in 2016, was declared bankrupt by the insolvency and companies court (ICC) of the high court in the UK. He later sought permission to appeal against his bankruptcy order. Sidhartha invests a chapter titled Sad about Dad, not discussing the case as much as his own helplessness watching his father go through this. "Everyone is entitled to their opinions… but at the end of the day, nobody wants to see someone so close to them suffer, whatever the reason be. To see the stress he has gone through over the last five years, has been painful and difficult," he says. What has, however, been most frustrating, is dealing with social media trolls. "I receive messages from people, having a go at me, blaming me for everything. Sometimes people say, ‘who are you to talk about mental health, when your father has caused mental ill-health to so many people'. [That's when] you kind of feel like you are caught between a rock and a hard place."

He says that while writing this book, he experienced a lot of different emotions. "I felt upset and angry, but I was adamant that this would not be an angry book. If and when I thought that was happening, I'd edit it out, because that would have not served the actual purpose of the book."