Shruti Haasan On Turning 40 & Calling The Shots | League of Excellence | THR India

Shruti Haasan has never been the person the world assumes her to be. In this deeply personal conversation with Sneha Menon Desai for The Hollywood Reporter India's League of Excellence powered by BMW India, the actress-musician peels back the layers of a public persona built over two decades — revealing the socially awkward backbencher who listened to metal and sketched alone, the introvert who found music's solitude comfortable but had to learn how to simply exist on a film set. At 40, Shruti reflects not with triumph but with a disarming confession: "I feel like I haven't learned enough. I haven't done enough. I haven't grown enough." She speaks about the years of crippling anxiety that made daily life impossible, the break from cinema that took her to London where she did her own laundry, took the tube to museums, and rebuilt her relationship with music from scratch — testing songs on audiences who had no expectations of Kamal Haasan's daughter.

What emerges is a portrait of dichotomy that Shruti not only accepts but cherishes. She is the "bright burning red" energy with a "stable core" surrounded by chaos; the woman with a "healthy dose of unapologetic insanity" who also harbors a "romantic vulnerable girl still stuck at 16." When Anupama asks about her father's famous shoulders, Shruti reframes the question entirely — those shoulders don't represent something to climb, but the comfort and nurturing of her "appa." She dissects the double standards women face ("what was considered abrasive in a woman is considered leadership in a man"), admits that living life on her own terms comes with loneliness, and reveals her severe allergic reaction to victim mentality. With 50 unreleased songs sitting quietly because she creates art for herself first, Shruti Haasan isn't chasing excellence — she's navigating it, one broken wall at a time.