Why Can't People Talk About Sex?

You’d never have guessed it, but this girl is the kind of belly-laughing, deliciously audacious energy that rarely rears its head in Bollywood’s politically correct quarters. When you hybridise a dainty demeanour with opinions daring enough to send Indian society into a spiral, you get Ileana D’Cruz...

- Saumyaa Vohra

Google Ileana D’Cruz, and the pictures that fill your screen are decidedly that of a ‘simple’ girl, the kind you’d cast as the quintessential ‘girl next door’. It’s a typecasting Ileana grudgingly acknowledges.

“It’s what people usually take me to be. They think I’m so ‘sweet’. It’s awful because I’m not like that; at least, I don’t think I am. I’m a bad*ss! I don’t go through life with a smile on my face, and you do not want to get on my nasty side!” she says, smiling sweetly.

But a conversation with her that comfortably meanders well beyond cinematic parameters proves that initial inference dead wrong. Far more brazen and reformist than most tender-footed Bollywood actors would be willing to admit being, Ileana is less a star, and more a realas-f*ck woman with a world view that our country, and particularly our society, desperately needs.