Alia Bhatt picked up the phone mid-interview and told her father she loved him, right there in a preview theatre, because that was the answer she wanted to give and not just one pulled from memory.

The moment surfaced in a video Soni Razdan posted on Instagram on September 17, shot after a screening of her new film Om Ka Hari. Alia had just been talking about her father Mahesh Bhatt's most irritating habit, and it turned out Mahesh was in the same building at the time.

The habit: he can't keep names straight. "It's very difficult to have a smooth, easy, free-flowing conversation when he forgets who he's talking to and then calls me Shaheen and then sometimes Soni and then some other people that I've never heard of and then does the same thing with everyone else," Alia said in the clip.

What makes the story land is the twist right after. Alia owned up to having caught the same habit herself. "But lo and behold, the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree, and now I do the exact same thing. So what's annoying is I've picked up on this quirk, and I've become this quirk," she said, sounding somewhere between amused and resigned.

Then came the question about the last time she'd told him she loved him. Instead of digging through memory, Alia rang him up on the spot, at the preview theatre where he happened to be standing, and said it live: "I love you daddy. That was the last time."

This isn't the first time Alia has talked about her father's larger-than-life presence growing up. She's previously described him as someone who turns ordinary moments theatrical almost on instinct, recalling how he once staged an elaborate gesture just so she wouldn't forget how to spell "the" before a first-standard test. "I remember him being this, like, grizzly bear, highly theatrical and highly entertaining," she'd said of that memory.

The video itself began as Soni Razdan's promotional post for Om Ka Hari, the film she appears in that hits theatres September 18, directed by Harish Vyas and produced by First Ray Films, with Anshuman Jha and Raghubir Yadav playing the title roles. But the Bhatt family aside is the part everyone's replaying.

Whether Mahesh has caught on to being called by three different names by his own daughter now, and whether it bothers him as much as it once bothered her, is something only the next family video will tell us.