Aditi Jayakar Kane for Mumbai Mirror

Jet Airways’s head honcho Naresh Goyal’s daughter Namrata prefers to work as assistant director, instead, for Farhan Akhtar's Don

While much of the cast and crew of Don is still unaware of the fact, one of the assistant director's (ADs) on the sets, seventeen-year-old Namrata is the daughter of Naresh Goyal, Chairman and founder of Jet Airways.

Namrata has just completed her 12 standard and wants to pursue a course in filmmaking and theatre acting from London. And as Farhan Akhtar was a family friend of the Goyals he offered to take her on board Don. Namrata says, "I want to be a director and a theatre actor. So I got through Farhan who put me on to Ritesh (Sidhwani) and once that was done it was very easy for. Earlier my dad was a bit reluctant to let me work on film sets but Farhan Akhtar reassured him."

Namrata had a great time with her stint as an AD. She says, "I've seen all of Farhan's films and I love them, so I was very excited about working with him. It was particularly exciting during the filming of the title track 'Main Hoon Kaun'. I'd never seen a song being filmed before so it was a lot of fun."

However, the experience did entail hard work. "For a week, I would be home by 6.30 in the morning and be back home only by 11.00 pm. I was dead tired by the time I would be back. There were 200 people on the sets and I had to work with 75. Basically I was AD number 3, so I had to get everyone organised, make sure the artistes were ready and the costumes were in order."

Any goof ups as a new comer? "Plenty," she giggles. "Like I made people wear the wrong costumes once or twice, but I shouldn't be saying this, I'll get fired!"

So did the people on the sets treat her differently knowing where she came from? "No one knew about my family," she says. "I made a lot of friends with the other Ads. There was Shakun, Nitya, Mansi, all senior to me."

But one person who she did enjoy having discussions with was Shah Rukh Khan. She says, "I discussed action sequences with him. That's one thing I wanted to learn about, I was curious to know about certain special effects and he explained them to me. I have met him before so I wasn't nervous talking to him."

 Producer Ritesh Sidhwani says, "Namrata was very professional as an intern. She was very hard working and came early in the morning to and worked till late in the night. Best wishes to her for the future!"