By
RUBY ZAIDI
Shruti Haasan told the media, “People would constantly ask me about him, it was like all the time. I would feel like, I am Shruti, I want my own identity. People would point at me and say, ‘Hey, that’s Kamal’s daughter’. If anyone asked me, I would say, ‘No, my father is Dr Ramachandran’, it was our dentist’s name. ‘And I am Pooja Ramachandran’, a name I made up.”
Reflecting on how difficult it was to escape her father’s fame while growing up in Chennai, she explained, “It’s not just that my dad is an actor or a famous person, I knew from childhood that he was different from anyone I met. I was brought up by two stubborn people and that rubbed off on me and my sister. I moved to Bombay when they separated. I never enjoyed being Shruti here. It’s difficult to separate from his fame when there are Appa’s posters all over the place. Today, I don’t even want to imagine Shruti without Kamal Haasan.
