'I'm still a baby in Bollywood'

'I've come across fans with my name tattooed on their arms.' 'The craziest fan was this guy who came all the way from Andhra to Mumbai to meet me and slept on the road for a couple of nights before he got what he wanted.'

- 

Pooja Hegde is among the highest paid leading ladies of Telugu cinema, thanks to superhits like Mukunda (2014), Duvvada Jagannadham (2017),Aravinda Sametha Veera Raghava (2018), Maharishi (2019), Gaddalakonda Ganesh (2019) and Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo (2020). In Bollywood, she started with a big project, Ashutosh Gowariker's Mohenjo Daro , opposite Hrithik Roshan. There's some bigger projects coming up Radhe Shyam with Prabhas, Cirkus with Ranveer Singh and Bhaijaan with Salman Khan. Having done Mohenjo Daro, which did not do as well as expected, to still have producers coming to me with good Hindi offers is something I'm proud of.

15 million followers on Instagram! How does a girl as young as you handle this kind of success?

I am very grateful for those staggering numbers.

More than anything else, I am aware that what I post can affect 15 million people. So I am very conscious of what I put out there. I think social media needs to be more responsible and positive. That's why whatever I upload is happy and positive. There is so much negativity on social media. We need to send out positive messages now more than ever.