Where's Shruti Hassan?

She started making movies to fund her music. Then the movies took over her life, in a way she likens to Godzilla, Now after six years of non-stop acting, Shruti Hassan is going back to her roots, roots that have nothing to do with film or her famous film-star parents and everything to do with a little band she started in LA back in the Nineties

- Dave Besseling

Shruti Haasan waited patiently inside a box for her cue. It was to be a surprise performance at an event starring her famous parents: Bollywood actress Sarika, and “the Amitabh Bachchan of the South”, Kamal Haasan. Her mother was to query, “Where’s Shruti?”, and the consummate ideal of a celebrity daughter would pop out and make her singing debut in front of a 200,000-member audience. No pressure.

And then, in what most of us only experience as anxiety dreams, she popped out and the music wasn’t there to back her up – just the vast silence of expectation. But instead of cracking, Shruti thought, “Screw it, I’m gonna sing anyway,” she explains, “and I went a capella. Then the track finally queued, people started cheering, and I just went ‘This is the shiz. This is what I wanna do for the rest of my life.’” She was seven years old.

Twenty-three years later, she hasn’t much strayed from her decision, made at an age when you couldn’t be trusted to tie your own shoes. “There’s just been nothing else that gave me that feeling,” she says.