Karenjit Kaur Vohra aka Sunny Leone has all the makings of a star. She has a beautiful face. When she moves, with that teeny sway, you can't just take your eyes off her. And her smile is inviting and seductive, open and coy,all at the same time.

In one of those strokes of luck that most mortals keep wistfully hoping for, Leone showed up in a tub,all splashing and warbling, and has since risen, Venus-like. The faintly philosophical question she flung out was capped definitively by her declaring that this duniya may be pittal di, but she was 'Baby doll, main soney di'.

The song was a smash hit, and catapulted Leone into the slimly-populated category of performers that movie-makers lust after. You can put them in a sack, and yet they are magnets. It helped, too, that Leone was already infamous before she hit Mumbai. As a 24-carat porn star, who had made a name for herself in the most notoriously exploitative industry in the world, Leone was positioned in a million men's (and women's) fantasies. She was freely available:all you had to have was a connection and an appetite.

The question now is: can she become an A-list Bollywood leading lady? Or will she be forever consigned to have-Sunny-will-get-her-to -show-skin corner? At this moment, there are no clear answers. She is one of the most searched names on search engines, and she has just outed herself in a film in which she is the node. The males revolve, satellite-like, around her. But Ek Paheli Leela is as much a roster of Leone's weaknesses as her strengths: her jaw-dropping assets are on abundant display, but so are her severely limited acting skills.

The film, which has no merit other than its heroine's stunning figure, has found enough takers (going by the first week end collections). Will this lead to a glut in which she continues to get stuffed into costumes and play peekaboo? Like other risk-averse mainstream film industries, Bollywood hates experimenting.

If skimpy outfits can reel them in, why bother with a plot? She can continue to do what she does best. Why be ambitious and try for more? But looking at Leone, and the spark of potential that lurks underneath all that glossy skin, you wish that someone would get her to work on herself. Which would entail not just making sure there is no flab on the abs, but also focus upon learning how to emote. To be a star who can also act is hard work.

Her skilling up, if she can do it, will be useful because there's a slot of the sexy-funny girl left wide open in Bollywood. You can go back, for a template, to Mumtaz, whose snub nose just added to her sexiness, and who could be a hoot.