Lavanya Tripathi defends Chiranjeevi after his earlier male heir remark: ‘If somebody comes for my family…’ | Telugu News
3 min readHyderabadFeb 12, 2026 07:05 PM IST
Lavanya Tripathi, wife of actor Varun Tej and daughter-in-law of Telugu superstar Chiranjeevi, has publicly defended her family against a wave of online criticism that erupted following the birth of Ram Charan and Upasana Konidela’s twins. Speaking during promotions for her upcoming film Sathi Leelavathi on Thursday, she addressed the controversy directly and without hesitation.
“That tweet was in very bad taste,” she said. “When a family is celebrating, what is the need for something like that? It’s my family. If someone comes at my family, I will not like it.”
Pressed further on a line from her original social media response, that very few men do even 1% of what Chiranjeevi does, she expanded rather than retreated. “I have great men in my life. I’m very lucky to have men around me who are genuinely supportive. I include all of them in that 1%, along with many, many others. We are a country of over a billion people. One percent is a lot.”
Her remarks were a direct response to a now-deleted tweet that had tied Chiranjeevi’s decision to hold a press conference, announcing the January 31 birth of Ram Charan and Upasana’s twins, a boy and a girl, to a pattern critics felt was hard to dismiss. The pointed question the tweet raised was one many had already been asking: why a press conference now, when no such announcement had accompanied the birth of the couple’s first child, daughter Klin Kaara, in 2023?
In her original reply, Lavanya had written that the author of the tweet clearly had no understanding of how Chiranjeevi treats the women in his family, especially his granddaughters. “Very few men can do even 1% of what he does,” she had written. “So it’s best not to comment on people you don’t truly know.”
The criticism, however, did not emerge in a vacuum. In February 2025, Chiranjeevi had made remarks at a pre-release event that had drawn backlash. He told the audience he had been urging Ram Charan to have a son so the family legacy could continue, joked about feeling like a “ladies’ hostel warden” surrounded by granddaughters, and admitted he feared the couple might have another girl.
