Bollywood Divas face Sunny eclipse

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Sunny Leone has dislodged Katrina Kaif, Kareena Kapoor and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as India's most googled celebrity. Thanks to the media hype over her presence in the reality show Big Boss 5, Sunny has acquired an incredible fan following in the country her parents left for a new life in Canada.

The honour of clocking the most number of searches for Sunny goes to surfers in Noida. Google Trends data collected in the last 30 days shows that her photos and videos have been downloaded the most, after Noida, in Bhubaneswar, Ludhiana and Bhopal.

Among the states, Orissa ranks first in being obsessed with Sunny, followed by Haryana, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

In the last 30 days, the name Sunny has been searched five times more than Bollywood diva Katrina and twice as many times as Aishwarya (despite the hoopla over her newborn baby). And she was ahead of Kareena by over nine times.

Flimmaker Mahesh Bhatt, who met Sunny inside the Big Boss House and offered her a role in his Jism 2, a sequel to the 2003 hit, is not surprised by the fascination of netizens for a porn star.

"This is not a sudden phenomenon," Bhatt said. "The world has a sweet tooth for sex and it has been happening since the dawn of time."

Inside the Big Boss house, Sunny has been consciously downplaying her porn star image. So, will she be able to hold her charm?

"I don't have a crystal ball to predict her future," Bhatt said. "She is a woman of rare integrity who is in the driving seat of life and is not apologetic about what she does." He was quick to add, though, that for long term survival in the movie industry, one has to have acting skills that are different from the kind of acts one has to perform in
a porn film.

The article was originally published in India Today Group’s Mail Today on December 14, 2011