Krishna Shroff Opens Up About Her Love Story With Afghan MMA Fighter Abdul Azim Badakhshi

The Daughter of Jackie Shroff Reveals One of Bollywood’s Most Unexpected and Genuinely Romantic Love Stories on Reality Show The 50

There are love stories that follow a script and there are love stories that could only happen the way they happened — two people who don’t share a first language, from two completely different worlds, brought together by a single word typed into an Instagram DM, and then by enough courage to follow what that word started. Krishna Shroff’s relationship with Afghan MMA fighter Abdul Azim Badakhshi is firmly in the second category, and the way she told it to her fellow contestants on the reality show The 50 — with the directness and warmth of someone who has thought very carefully about what love actually means and arrived at a definition she trusts — made it the most talked-about personal revelation of the season.

Who Is Krishna Shroff?

Krishna Shroff in a white lace dress holding an invitation card for “The 50” reality show by a poolside 

Krishna Shroff is many things simultaneously, and the label that most media defaults to — “Jackie Shroff’s daughter” or “Tiger Shroff’s sister” — captures only the most superficial layer of who she is. A fitness entrepreneur, model, and increasingly prominent television personality, Krishna has been building her own identity with the methodical determination of someone who decided early that proximity to a famous family is neither an achievement nor a limitation. She competed in the village-based reality show Chhoriyan Chali Sasural in 2025, finishing as runner-up, and entered JioHotstar and Colors TV’s high-intensity competition show The 50 from February 1, 2026 — a show that places contestants in physically and psychologically demanding tasks inside a palace setting designed to test every dimension of character simultaneously. Speaking about joining the show before her entry, Krishna said she considered herself “her own biggest competitor” — a self-assessment that the show’s arc has consistently validated.

Who Is Abdul Azim Badakhshi?

Abdul Azim Badakhshi flexing muscles shirtless in gym wearing MMA shorts 

Abdul Azim Badakhshi — known in MMA circles as “The Afghan Lion” — was born on 20 August 1995 in the village of Mashhad in the Kishim District of Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan, into an ethnic Tajik family. His sporting life began with kickboxing and evolved through Wushu — in which he represented Afghanistan at the national team level in international competitions — before he transitioned to professional MMA in 2013. Competing in the featherweight division (76 kg) at 180 cm tall, Badakhshi carries a professional MMA record of 14 wins and 5 losses, with 11 of his 14 victories coming by knockout — a finishing rate that reflects the specific aggression of a fighter trained across multiple striking disciplines. His career has taken him from the Afghanistan Fighting Championship and Kabul fight nights to the Super Fight League in India, Brave CF in Bahrain, ACB 86 in Moscow, and the Matrix Fight Night circuit in India’s National Capital Region, where the bulk of his recent career has been based. His brother Abdul Karim Badakhshi is also a professional MMA fighter, making theirs a fighting family in the most literal sense.

Badakhshi is a devout Muslim and has been involved in human rights activities alongside his fighting career. The most widely cited moment in his professional story — beyond his fights — was a 2023 incident at Matrix Fight Night 9 in New Delhi, where a cage altercation with Indian fighter Srikant Sekhar led to a fracture of Sekhar’s jaw, criminal charges, and a year-long imprisonment at Tihar Jail in Delhi. Badakhshi maintained that the Indian fighter had been insulting Afghan fans — a claim that reflected the specific cultural and nationalistic tensions that international MMA competition in India has generated — and the Matrix Fight Night organization subsequently banned all Afghan fighters from its promotion in response. The incident is the chapter of his story that precedes the one that has made him famous in India’s entertainment press.​

The Love Story — How It All Began

The story begins, as many of the best ones now do, with a single message in a social media inbox. Krishna and Abdul Azim met first at an event in Mumbai, but the connection did not fully ignite at that initial encounter. What sparked it was an Instagram DM — the most low-stakes opening gambit in modern courtship — and specifically the confidence with which what came next was delivered. Krishna described the moment on The 50 during a candid conversation with fellow contestants Prince Narula and Yuvika Chaudhary: “Then I went to my Instagram DMs and found his profile, and he had texted me ‘hi’. So I replied. But he immediately asked me for my number. I was like, no one has ever approached me with so much confidence before — and I like confidence.”

What makes the story immediately unusual is the language dimension — the element that in most love stories is a barrier and in this one became the texture of the connection. He speaks Persian. She speaks English. Both speak Hindi with the endearing imprecision of people for whom it is a third language — her description of his Hindi as “like mine, a bit broken” delivered with evident affection for that shared imperfection. Despite the linguistic gap, they talked on video calls for eight months — long, patient conversations about life, family, values, and the world each of them came from — before they met in person for the first time.

Goa, Delhi, and the Decision That Changed Everything

The first physical meeting was in Goa, and they spent two weeks together — the kind of time that compresses months of accumulated knowledge into daily lived experience. When the two weeks ended, both understood with the particular clarity that endings produce that they were at a crossroads. Krishna described the airport goodbye with the kind of honesty that makes reality television worth watching when it occasionally delivers what it promises: “When we were saying goodbye after two weeks, we knew maybe we wouldn’t meet again. So at the airport, we both started crying.”

He flew to Delhi to visit a friend. She flew back to Mumbai. Then he told her he couldn’t go back — to Afghanistan, to the distance, to the life before the two weeks in Goa. She went to Delhi to meet him. They spent three weeks in Delhi together, and during those three weeks the relationship became what both of them had already understood it to be during the airport goodbye. At the end of those three weeks, Krishna made the decision with the directness that characterizes everything she has described about herself: “I asked him directly, ‘Do you want to come to Mumbai? You can stay with me.’ And we immediately moved in together.”

The detail that the move was immediate — not tentative, not trial-period, not gradual — is the detail that most clearly reflects both of their characters. A fighter who approaches a stranger’s Instagram DM with the confidence to ask for her number within the first exchange, and a woman who makes the decision to share her home based on three weeks of confirmed clarity — together, they constitute a couple whose speed of conviction the three years of live-in relationship since has apparently justified.

Love, Defined in Her Own Words

For Krishna, the most important thing she shared on The 50 was not the story of how they met but the definition she has arrived at for what love means. Sitting with Prince Narula and Yuvika Chaudhary — a married couple themselves, whose own relationship history has been publicly documented — she said that for her, love means caring about her partner’s happiness. The simplicity of the definition is its precision — it says nothing about grand gestures or shared milestones or social validation, and everything about the daily orientation of one person toward another.

The Bollywood Family Dimension

Krishna’s relationship exists in the specific context of a Bollywood family whose every personal development becomes public discussion. Her father Jackie Shroff is one of Hindi cinema’s most beloved actors — a four-decade career of iconic films and the specific warmth of a personality that the industry has never managed to find complicated. Her brother Tiger Shroff is among the most photographed action stars of his generation, and his own relationships have been subject to the constant tabloid attention that comes with that profile. For Krishna, the decision to discuss her relationship on The 50 rather than through managed press releases or carefully curated social media announcements reflects the straightforward approach she has brought to her public persona: this is her life, told in her words, in a format where the conversation rather than the caption carries the meaning.

Abdul Azim, for his part, has not kept the relationship private either — he has shared clips from The 50 on his Instagram Stories and the couple have featured each other regularly on their social media profiles, the cross-cultural relationship visible in the bilingual comment sections and the specific warmth of a relationship documented by two people who are not performing privacy and are not performing public couplehood, but are simply present together.

The 50 — The Show Where the Story Emerged

Krishna Shroff holding diploma by pool in white lace off-shoulder dress 

The 50 is a reality competition show streaming on JioHotstar and airing on Colors TV, structured around high-intensity tasks in a palace setting designed to push 50 contestants toward physical, psychological, and social limits. The show has produced a Grand Finale Top 4 of Mr Faisu, Shiv Thakare, Rajat Dalal, and Immortal Kaka, and has featured numerous personal moments from its diverse contestant pool that have generated as much audience conversation as the competitive tasks themselves. Krishna’s fitness background and competitive sporting orientation made her a natural fit for the show’s physical dimensions — her own description of herself as “her own biggest competitor” is the kind of self-awareness that reality show environments tend to either confirm or dismantle, and in Krishna’s case the former has held. It was in this setting — amid the pressure, the communal living, and the unusual candour that reality competition environments produce — that the Afghan MMA fighter and the Instagram DM became public knowledge and became, for a day, the most discussed love story in Indian entertainment.

Why This Story Resonates

Love stories that cross cultural borders, language barriers, and the specific social distance between a Bollywood family and a fighter from Badakhshan, Afghanistan — who met at a Mumbai event, connected in Instagram DMs, video-called across time zones for eight months, cried at a Goa airport, decided in Delhi, and moved in together the same week — are not the love stories that screenwriters tend to pitch because the arc is too compressed and too improbable. The screenwriter’s version of this story would add obstacles, delays, misunderstandings, a third-act crisis. The real version moved from a “hi” to a shared apartment with a speed that both people trusted rather than questioned, and has apparently given them no reason to regret that trust since.

When Krishna told Prince Narula and Yuvika Chaudhary that love means caring about her partner’s happiness, she was not quoting a philosophy or performing a sentiment for the cameras. She was describing the specific orientation of a woman who chose a man whose first language she doesn’t speak, whose world was nothing like hers, and who had the confidence to ask for her number before she had even fully decided to reply to the “hi” — and decided that this combination of qualities was exactly what love was supposed to feel like.