My mother would slog endlessly at the farm for 10-12 hours every day, cutting costs by doing everything herself and making my brothers and me do our share because she did not want us getting fancy ideas about ourselves

From studying the complexities of the human mind, she moved to mulling over fowl matters and is now sitting pretty on the many eggs in her basket. Anuradha Desai, chairperson, Venkateshwara Hatcheries, was unfazed by the recent global panic about avian flu. A great lover of the ubiquitous chicken curry herself, the diminutive boss speaks about stepping into her father's shoes in a freewheeling conversation with Simrin Makhija

Her life and work revolve around these feathered friends, yet there was a time when she wanted nothing to do with them. Her calling was psychology, she had decided. Does the 42-year-old, regret giving in to her father's pressure and joining the family business? “Initially, I did try to convince him that I was not interested, but now that I am neck deep in it, I know this is the best thing to have happened to me.”

Though ably helped by her two brothers, Venky and Balaji, as the group's chairperson, Desai has to walk the tightrope between meeting the demands of work and her family. She has tried to solve this problem by working out of home the better part of the day, so that she can attend to her eleven-year-old school going daughter, Uttara, named after her mother.

The residence, a farmhouse Dr Rao built on the outskirts of Pune is a study in simplicity, bursting with memorabilia of her parents and their achievements in the poultry industry. Chicken and eggs are a regular part of the family diet and Desai says every item that the company puts into the market in the ready-to-eat segment is first tasted by the family before it hits the retail shelves. “What's not good for my family can't be good for anybody else.”