Chetna Pande on Life After Haunted 3D: 'I Don't Want to Limit Myself Anymore'

There is something about the hills that Chetna Pande cannot quite leave behind. She grew up among them, and even after years of chasing dreams in Mumbai, she kept returning - not as a tourist, but as someone going home to heal.

With her horror film Haunted 3D: Echoes Of The Past now earning her the recognition she spent years working toward, Chetna sat down to talk about what it really took to get here. The conversation that followed was less about Bollywood and more about belief - in God, in family, and in not quitting when life makes quitting feel like the only reasonable option.

"No matter how strong you are, there comes a point when you get tired," she says, with the quiet certainty of someone who has actually been there. "Whenever that happened, I used to go back home."

Home meant her father, and her father meant the mountains. Together they would visit temples - Naina Devi, Patal Bhuvaneshwar in Gangolihat - spending a week away from the noise of the city. "After visiting those temples, I felt so strong that I could come back and continue my fight in Mumbai," she says. It was a ritual of restoration, repeated as many times as the city broke her down.

But what strikes you most about Chetna's story is not the struggle itself - it is how clearly she understands that it was never hers alone. Every rejection she faced rippled back to her parents. Every closed door disappointed them as much as it did her. "I only wanted to make them proud once," she says, "and prove that all those years of hard work had not gone to waste."

When the film finally released and her parents watched it with tears of pride, something shifted. "I realized that we spend years struggling just for one moment of happiness," she says. It sounds simple. Coming from her, it sounds earned.

The mountains, it turns out, also gave her something else: a comfort with the unexplained. Growing up hearing her grandfather speak about spirits and unfinished time on earth made the supernatural feel less like fiction and more like folklore she had always known. Her horror film, in many ways, is an extension of that world.

She recounts a story her father once told her - of studying as a child near a Christian graveyard because it was the only quiet place available to a boy sharing a single room with four siblings. He was fearless then. But something followed him home. Curtains moved without wind. At night, he felt suspended in the air, weightless and watched. A woman with spiritual powers eventually performed a ritual - a Jhaar Pooja - and the presence was drawn out and dissolved.

Chetna tells the story without drama, as though it is simply part of the landscape she comes from.

What is harder to tell without emotion is what the past six months have actually looked like for her. "The last six months of my life were the darkest I have ever experienced," she says. Her mother fell seriously ill. Her partner was diagnosed with a health condition. Her pet was found to have cancer. And even on the morning of this interview, her mother had a fever and she was not sure she would make it here at all.

She did make it. And she is, somehow, looking forward.

"Audiences have accepted me through this film, and now I'm looking forward to more interesting opportunities," she says. "I want to explore different genres. I don't want to limit myself."

She ends the conversation the way she has probably ended many dark nights - not with optimism exactly, but with resolve. "Life will always bring problems, but we should never give up. There will be so many obstacles, all of them would try to break you - but never give up."

From someone who has sat in the silence of mountain temples and walked back into the chaos of Mumbai, over and over again, it does not sound like a cliché. It sounds like the truest thing she knows.