Sunny Leone and Vidya "Dirty Picture" Balan

They are two women who have been setting the screens afire over the past month. The first, Vidya Balan, an actress par excellence, has been zipping around the country promoting her film The Dirty Picture produced by TV czarina Ekta Kapoor. Vidya has been taking pains to emphasize that is okay to be sexy and women should be comfortable being buxom and meaty, and she has been playing true to her on-screen character during these promotions: talking bindass. The second is the Indo Canadian porn star Sunny Leone who has come on board The Bigg Boss 5 and has been hypnotizing India with her cute sexy girl act. Vidya has got rave reviews for her performance in the film. She has added kilos, oomph, dropped some attire to fit into her character of Silk, a starlet who uses her voluptuous body to make her way into filmdom. Her and the Balaji Films marketing team’s efforts have paid dividends: the film, reportedly has had 85-90 per cent occupancy over its first weekend. Sunny Leone has on the other hand been playing down the fact that she is from the sleaze industry and has told the other housemate that she is from Hollywood. She has been behaving contrary to what most expect of a porn star. She has not stripped off her clothes, keeping herself covered. She has not talked dirty, choosing to instead talk sweet. She has attempted to blend, quite unsuccessfully, rather than stand out. That is she is dynamite is something that even Vidya knows: she chose to clad Sunny in her trademark red saree and even shook a leg with her on the single Ooh La La when she came on Bigg Boss 5 as part of a promotional tie up earlier this week. The ratings of Bigg Boss 5 have been rising – albeit marginally – ever since she entered the show. But, more than that, what Sunny has achieved is that she has captured a nation’s psyche. So much so that she has started outscoring well-established Bollywood starlets such as Katrina Kaif, Kareena Kapoor, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Vidya Balan in searches on Google. According to Google Trends, Sunny Leone has been searched twice as many times as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in India over the past 30 days. Five times more Indians typed out Sunny Leone in Google search as compared to Katrina Kaif. Sunny out searched Kareena Kapoor nine times over in the same period. And what about Vidya? Well, Sunny seems to have won the popularity battle with the sultry siren. Vidya is only 20 per cent as popular as the sex goddess is on Google trend searches. All this when she has made only an appearance on a single show on the small screen. Wonder what Sunny will do when she makes it to the big screen?