The Business of Being Poonam Pandey

Poonam Pandey with her five-year-long Twitter striptease, knows how to keep lakhs of Indian men hooked online, and turn that into big business.

- Arnesh Ghose

Men are imaginative beings, which is why I suppose porn is such a successful industry. By nature, we choose to escape into a fairy tale filled with nymphs and goddesses who exist for our pleasure, dropping a bath towel (or a brassiere) at the drop of, well, a hat. Seeing is believing. Vast hordes of men believe that Poonam Pandey is a naughty seductress, a sex goddess, who some day (very soon, really soon, maybe tomorrow) will take off that tiny G-string just for them. Pandey makes herself available for public consumption with every tweet. In an online world where nip-slips and wardrobe malfunctions are juicy clickbait, here is a woman who is happy to flaunt generous amounts of T&A, sans pixellation, sans emoticons, sans blur tool. Poonam Pandey wants you to want to see her naked.

We are sitting in a claustrophobic office in an industrial estate in Mumbai’s film suburb. The office is lit by dim bulbs, and a bunch of producers, complete with thick gold chains and expansive equators, sit behind a glass partition, shrewdly keeping an eye on the interview. Pandey looks like she is dressed for a media event — extra make-up, white (and bursting at-the-seams tight) pinstripe formal skirt and blazer over a blue tank top, which supports her attention hungry cleavage with some difficulty. Men must find it extremely difficult to look her in the eye while talking to her. Pandey is warm and forthcoming, and she often breaks into peals of laughter.

We chit-chat to break the ice; she chooses to use the Bengali pronunciation of my name and then asks what this interview will be about. I tell her that no one has done a profile on her before. Pandey politely tells me that she is just a few years old in this industry and maybe that is why no one has bothered. I tell her that this is