Prateik: Mom's family and Raj Babbar fought for my custody

Prateik Babbar has now changed his name to Prateik Smita Patil and this is finally his surname after many changes. The actor spoke about the entire journey of finally sticking to this surname and his thought process. Prateik lost his mother Smita Patil as soon as he was born, so he grew up with his maternal grand parents. However, in a recent interview, he has revealed that there was a custody battle for him.Prateik was born to Smita and Raj Babbar. The actors had fallen in love when Raj was already married to Nadira and had two children. He still married Smita. Prateik revealed in an interview on Varinder Chawla's Youtube channel, "I was born Prateik. There was a custody battle for me from my mom’s side of the family and my father’s side of the family. My mom’s side won. There was still a battle for the surname. Finally, in the passport, it was ‘Prateik Smit Babbar’.

It wasn’t even Smita, so growing up I was ‘Prateik Smit Babbar’. In school, everyone thought I was Christian because they would wonder ‘why Smit?’, no one cared for Babbar. Everyone just called me Smit."He also added that why he changed his name to just Prateik after his first film and how he was bitter about his parents. He said, "In my first film, my name was Prateik Babbar and then the devil got the better of me and I started thinking ‘Kaun hai maa? Kaun hai baap? (Who is mom? Who is dad?)’ Then I started thinking, ‘I don’t want to be Patil, I don’t want to be Babbar.

I want to be just Prateik.’ For a few films, I was only Prateik because I was bitter about my parents.

I was like, I don’t want to belong to them. They have only given me trauma my entire life. I don’t want to belong to them and then I continued with Prateik."Opening up on finally embracing his mother's name as his surname, he said, "I had to embrace that name, it makes me complete. Now, I am complete, I feel complete. Priya said ‘Prateik, you owe it to her, she gave her life for you, you owe that, you are her son’ and that hit different. I was like ‘this is who I have to be’."

Prateik tied the knot recently with Priya Banerjee on Valentine's day this year.