When Kacon Sethi was holidaying in Chittorgarh, Rajasthan, she had a sense of d?j? vu. “I felt I was part of the history of the place,” she says.

Don’t be fooled by her historical leanings, though. The 40-year-old IIM-Calcutta alumnus is a veteran in the field of media and entertainment and has done everything from media planning and buying to ad sales.

Her first job was with advertising agency JWT (formerly J. Walter Thompson) in Calcutta in 1989. She was a media trainee. “It was a very risky proposition at that time,” says Sethi. “Considering that it was the creative message that was the final frontier, my interests lay in media which would be the vehicle for this message. I was confident that media would explode and so wanted to be in the forefront when it did,” she adds.

The initial years were gruelling, but the tougher task was getting people to understand media. Sethi remembers how the media department was relegated to the backwaters of the office and handled by people who were at least 20 years senior to her. But she got to work with companies like ITC and Emami where she could provide some strategic thinking for their products.

After a two-year stint in Calcutta, Sethi headed where most advertising people end up ? Mumbai. Here again, she worked on the Levers and Godrej accounts as a senior planner with JWT. She was whisked away for a while to the Times of India where she had her shortest stint (11 months) helping the sales team. Then she was back to media planning with Grey Worldwide. In 1995, when her boss Lynn de Souza decided to leave the organisation, the search was on to fill her shoes as a national media planning director. In January 1995, Sethi was offered the job.

“It was exhilarating and traumatic too,” says Sethi. According to her, while the task of national media planner was daunting and exciting, she was apprehensive about how her colleagues would handle the change and her own ability to handle clients. “And then I decided I would not step into Lynn's shoes because I would be constantly compared. I would lay down my own rules to prove my mettle.”

Sethi was then the youngest national media director in the country. Within a short span of six years, she had reached the peak of her advertising career. And it might well have stayed that way if Sony Entertainment Television (SET) had not come calling.

“It was ironic,” recalls Sethi. “One afternoon, SET made a presentation to us for their product launch and I made some critical points. The very next day, the CEO offered me a job to head the ad-sales team in SET,” she adds. Giving up a cushy job for a TV channel that was just starting was considered foolhardy. But Sethi took the plunge.

For the next seven years, she did nothing but eat, drink and sleep television. “It was launch time for the channel and I brought my organisational skills to the table. Those seven years in SET have moulded the professional in me to what I am today,” says Sethi. She held several positions in the company, from assistant vice-president for sales and marketing to chief executive officer of SET Max when it was launched. For Sethi, the stint at SET has been one of the most emotionally challenging ones. But there was personal life to take care of too. Motherhood beckoned. Almost overnight, she quit SET in early 2002.

Sethi took a two-year sabbatical to spend time with her adopted daughter and do all what a mom does. But the professional in her refused to lie low for long. In 2003, K Sera Sera ? a film production company ? offered her a chance to head the organisation. She finally accepted the assignment in 2004.

As CEO, Sethi has been responsible for turning around the company’s fortunes not only in terms of revenue but also in terms of diversification into newer areas like television and new media. She has finally come home, she believes. Entertainment is where her future lies. For one who nursed dreams of writing songs for Bollywood, she is right now calling the shots as a producer of Bollywood movies. That’s a career script she won’t have any dissonance with.

As told to Aparna Harish in Calcutta