Her production company is at an all-time high professionally but Ekta Kapoor admits that she is still fighting some personal demons

She is envied for her hard work and success but she is also given many not so flattering tags.
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A tough slave driver, short tempered, mistrusting and many more. Refreshingly, Ekta admits to all of them but says she's a changed woman today.

After enjoying huge success, your company went through a really bad phase in 2008 and suffered a loss of around Rs 14 crore. What did that phase teach you?
We lost more than 14 crore. After a steady success for eight years, suddenly everything started going wrong.u00a0 I was a wreck. Channel 9, where we had many serials running, shut down, we had this fight with Star TV, we had paid advance to a company to make films and that wasn't materialising, ask me what didn't go wrong. Only post Pavitra Rishta that things started looking up. This is when I realised that if I took calculated proposals it would be a big risk to take.u00a0 My choice was making a huge film and spend two crores over promotions or make a three crore film and depend on the content. Brand Balaji going for the brand value of Dibakar and going completely against the flavour and texture of what they have been doing itself made enough noise to launch a brand.

Also it perhaps gained you more respect as till then in spite of being called the czarina of television you were also criticised for making regressive content...
But if you ask me, I am still more proud of my achievements in television.u00a0 It is so tough to cater to that many tastes. I might not understand the financial situation of a middle class home but the middle class values I can totally identify with. In fact, there was a survey that said that women in homes got more assertive after this TV boom started. So many of my friends told me that I make regressive serials, but these were the people who wouldn't even watchu00a0 TV. They would sayu00a0- 'Oh I watched one or two scenes and I didn't like what I saw'. I would call such people myopic. I still have far more respect for TV producers because there is no star power there; all that works is the content. Those TV producers are not lunching with Salman Khan or dining with SRK. All they have is the content that could either make a serial or break it. I on a personal level just ran out of stories to tell on television, so the only other medium available for me was films where I could explore darker, edgier stories. Stories with more layers...in truth, I am bohemian in thought and conservative in action.