Bollywood: Her Father’s Daughter Shruti Haasan

By Ameta Bal. Photographs by Tarun Khiwal. Styled by MonaliShruti Haasan must have been a precocious child, in fact, she’s still precocious. But the 24-year-old singer-actress believes her partying days are behind her, and insists she doesn’t like free time. “As a kid my ultimate dream was never to have too much free time… until I retire,” she states. By that logic, Shruti is in her manic dreamland right now, as she constantly zips between Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai. In Hyderabad, she’s shooting for a Telugu language Walt Disney production; in Chennai, she’s shooting a trilingual film Ezham Arivu (The Seventh Sense) by Ghajini-director A.R. Murugadoss as well as practising with her new band; and she comes back home to her apartment in Mumbai to work on her music and unwind, which is where we meet her. (Content and images courtesy: Marie Claire India. Visit Marie Claire India at www.outlookindia.com/marieclaire)

Having finished the fitting session, Shruti changes back into her floral summer dress (a definite contrast to the look on our cover) and settles down on the couch. She’s had this apartment in Khar for about six months now but is kind of blasé about it, perhaps as a result of having lived away from home since she was 18. “After being alone for so long, it’s very hard to live with people again unless they’re really mellow and pamper you instead of bothering you.” The older daughter of the iconic actors Kamal Haasan and the beautiful Sarika, who formalised their relationship when Shruti was five and had a contentious break up a few years ago, Shruti comes across as very self-assured. But her clipped mannerisms and curt-to-the-point-of-being-defensive answers hint at an extremely controlled personality. She almost dares you to ask about her relationship with her parents. Kamal Haasan is now with former Tamil film star Gauthami while Sarika is reportedly on strained terms with the rest of her family. You ask a very roundabout question: Would they be open to her living with someone? “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask them,” she replies, curtly. Star kids can take their hankered-after status as a boon or a curse. While some of them bask in their parents’ reflected glory, others tend to get slightly prickly about the issue. Shruti tilts towards the latter. On the topic of her estrangement with her mother, she sticks to non-committal answers. “I love my mum and it’s something I don’t like to talk about,” she said on On the Couch with Koel last year. Similarly, she prefers to be evasive about her love life, denying rumours about her link ups with Siddharth (of Rang De Basanti fame) and her last band’s drummer. It’s hard to persist when faced with such obvious ‘keep off’ signs topped by that ‘I hate free time’ statement, so you quietly drop the family talk. That’s how good the girl’s defences are!(Content and images courtesy: Marie Claire India. Visit Marie Claire India at www.outlookindia.com/marieclaire)

But Shruti is quite happy to talk about what it was like to grow up in an artistic environment. “I remember Birju Maharaj dancing in the house one day and M.F. Husain teaching me to sketch. Of course, at the time I didn’t know who they were. I used to be like, ‘Oh, that uncle was nice’. I realised later how lucky I was to get that. Dad would sing, dance and teach us movie tricks. Mom was a good artist and used to paint and write. I always wanted to be a performer and my options were unlimited. I think I’ve managed to do some of that stuff, so it makes me quite happy.” Incidentally, her 19-year-old sister Akshara, to whom she is very close, is a dancer.To her credit Shruti didn’t grow up wanting to be an actor like her parents. She sang a few songs for her father’s movies as a child, but funnily enough, it was mathematics that led her to discover her professional aptitude for music. “I was really bad at mathematics. My mum would have a nervous breakdown looking at my marks. But then my school told me I could drop math for architecture, art or music. I don’t know why they didn’t tell me earlier and save everyone a lot of trouble, but anyway that’s how I first took up Hindustani Classical music and aced all my exams,” she says. She continued her Hindustani music training with her teacher Pandit Manohar Kulkarni till she decided to head to Hollywood to study at the Musicians Institute in 2005. Her passion for rock, however, she owes to her parents. When Shruti was young, Sarika used to love Pink Floyd while Kamal Haasan was into The Who.Of the two-and-a-half years she spent as a student in Los Angeles, she says, “It was an eye-opening experience for me. I went there with the confidence of five years of classical training. Until then, though, I only sang. I didn’t play any instrument or write music. I thought, ‘I’ll just sing and it’ll be fine’. Then I saw all these multi-talented people there who were a million miles ahead of me and I got really scared! I was, like, ‘I know nothing!’ It was a nightmare. Because of that I studied a little longer than I had planned to. It took six hours of piano practice and singing every day to get my confidence back. I also started writing my own songs. It was there that I first got into acting as a part of my course.” (Content and images courtesy: Marie Claire India. Visit Marie Claire India at www.outlookindia.com/marieclaire)

In the film industry, Shruti might so far only be known for starring opposite Imran Khan in the film Luck, which failed at the box office, but on the music circuit, people know her as the hot lead vocalist of The Extramentals, a rock band that formed in 2008 and disbanded a year later. She now fronts a six-member band, which has already performed twice. Where The Extramentals comprised friends living their rock n’ roll dream, who liked to define themselves as an alternative rock band, Shruti’s co-musicians this time are all sessions players and their music is more positive, tilting towards pop rock. “What I really like about this band is it’s much more Shruti-centric, and as self-centred as it may sound, this time round it’s about being true to the kind of music I write. Sometimes bands go through this whole ‘Oh, we’re like The Beatles and we are a family and we drink out of the same cup and now we’re playing a gig’, but that really doesn’t work anymore. Music and its audience have changed. I’m happy my current band members are more disciplined and they understand the value of just showing up for a gig or a rehearsal.” She counts artistes as varied as Madonna, R.D. Burman and Swedish extreme metal band Meshuggah as her all-time favourites, and emphasises her aversion to musical stereotyping. “I don’t understand when someone says Bollywood music or metal is crap. Music is music. You can take it or leave it but slamming something you don’t understand is quite unfair. As a musician especially, you can never dislike any genre of music, or you aren’t a musician. You can’t be creative if you’re not open.”(Content and images courtesy: Marie Claire India. Visit Marie Claire India at www.outlookindia.com/marieclaire)

While her band is prepping to perform in Mumbai soon, Shruti is also giving her film career another shot. The still-untitled Disney film is a fantasy, in which she plays the role of a gypsy. As a graphic novel fan, she says she was drawn to the project, despite her apprehension about shooting in Telugu. In the action film Ezham Arivu, being shot in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu simultaneously, she stars opposite award-winning Tamil actor Surya. She’s also just signed Madhur Bhandarkar’s next rom-com Dil Toh Bachcha Hai Ji. All of her films are slated to release some time next year. Like all star kids, Shruti will, for a while at least, face some cynicism from critics who won’t hesitate to remind her of the help she’s had to get onto the celebrity bandwagon. But the prospect hasn’t left her too flustered. She takes that kind of criticism neither too lightly nor too seriously. “I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t matter that you’re a star kid,” she admits. “It does open doors, but at the end of the day, like everyone else, you keep working and improving, and that’s what counts. I’m proud of my lineage. It’s given me a lot in many ways but now, the journey for myself begins.” (Content and images courtesy: Marie Claire India. Visit Marie Claire India at www.outlookindia.com/marieclaire)

Her Father’s Daughter Shruti Haasan

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