At 27, actor Deepika Padukone looks back and confesses that she may not have made all the right choices.

After five years in the film industry, she says, “It feels as if it were yesterday! It was so unnerving and unclear when I first came into the industry. I was a 21-year-old in a new city, living all by myself, and I got into in an industry where I didn’t know a soul.”

And that, she says, is the reason that she refused a movie with Bollywood’s ‘it’ man, Salman Khan, with whom she can’t wait to work now. “I wasn’t ready. I was too young and unclear about which profession to choose at that time. A lot of people thought I was foolish to let it go, but I guess it was destined.

But I am glad that I didn’t do the film, because I know I wouldn’t have done justice to it and our pairing then,” she says, expressing her desire to join the Sallu camp now even though she started as a Shah Rukh Khan heroine with Om Shanti Om (2007). Up next, she’s braced for some big releases — Chennai Express, Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Race 2, Ram Leela.