Why Sunny The “Whole Woman” Will Always Remain A Mystery?

Does Sunny Leone, the porn star really stand in the way of Sunny Leone the Bollywood actor? In the age of the Internet, who are we fooling? Asks Usri Basistha

- Usri Basistha

Quite a sizable number of Indians must be googling Sunny Leone for her to surpass the number of searches for our very social media savvy prime minister. But when TV journalist Bhupendra Chaubey made it a point to turn this into a refrain while interviewing “the most googled person in India in 2015” for his show The Hot Seat, it struck me as odd. How can “most googled” be moulded into an insult for anyone? Our prime minister would have been glad had he not been shoved off the No. 1 spot. The person who has now acquired that position, however, is being cornered to take it with a pinch of salt. Why indeed?

I never thought of this or anything else about Sunny until the word ‘misogyny’ (hatred, fear and distrust of women) came up to describe Chaubey’s attitude towards the actor. Now, I could evade the questions no more as this was all over social media.

Even earlier, in fact, staying off Sunny was quite a task because the media had these seasonal fixations with her every few months. Sunny Leone on Big Boss. Sunny Leone doing Bollywood film. Sunny Leone accused of corrupting the “innocuous imagination” of the Indian audience. So on and so forth. And there was also the possibility of Google getting impatient and misunderstanding a search for ‘Sunny Deol’.

No wonder when I did finally key in those two words on Google search, there was also a news item on how Sunny Leone had apologised to Sunny Deol for causing him an identity crisis among youngsters.