“She is calmer than me — that she gets from her dad. I am more hyper,” says Lataa Hegde of her daughter, actor Pooja Hegde. With that out of the way, she rattles off a long list of similarities between her and Pooja: “We’re both very ethical — we always stand by our word. We’re both home birds. We have few friends but solid ones. We’re also very hard-working. If we set our minds on doing anything, we will achieve it.” There’s one more thing yet that Lataa says she and her daughter share.

“We’re great multi-taskers, and ambitious. Pooja has definitely got that work keeda in her, and that ambition — that you got to be somebody, she definitely got it from us,” she tells us.

It is perhaps this last quality that enabled the 64-year-old to achieve what she has in life. The true-blue Mumbaikar, Lataa did a BSc in Life Sciences before pursuing a course in Public Relations from St Xavier’s College, besides studying Marketing Management from Jamnabai Bajaj Institute of Management Studies.

Lataa wanted to study Medicine, but since seats were limited in Mumbai, her “typical South Indian family” didn’t allow her to relocate. “My family said to get married and then go wherever I want,” she adds.

Lataa, who got married at 25, goes on tell us how she completed her MBA after that. “I was carrying my son, Rishabh. I finished the course and he was born,” she says.

After completing her master’s in Marketing Management, she got a job in advertising. But she had to let go of that before long. “My husband was in advertising, too, and one of us had to get out of it. I was clear that we wanted two children and would have them not too far apart. So, till they were four or five, I had to be a stay-at-home mother. Two years later, Pooja was born. When she turned four, I realized I wanted to get back to work,” she recalls.

Entrepreneurship followed after that, and Lataa started a business in computer education and software development. “As a working mum, I divided my time between work and raising my school-going children,” she says.