Love, sex and Shama

Actress Shama Sikander, who is seen in Vikram Bhatt’s erotic web-series Maaya, is hogging all the limelight for her bold avatar on screen. Known for her simpleton roles in television shows like Baal Veer and Yeh Meri Life Hai, the bombshell has shed off all her inhibitions for her new role. Maaya explores the concept of BDSM (Bondage Domination Submission and Masochism) and has become very popular concept in the West but in India, where sex is such a taboo word, BDSM is still a very alien term. Moreover, a woman talking about her sexual desires is looked down upon here. “Women in India are always instructed to behave in a certain manner, talk properly, sit properly etc. So in a country where most women don’t even know the man they get married to, how can she even think about her sexual desires,” Shama says. Many people associate BDMS to mental illness or something that emerges from abuse or domestic violence. But engaging in it does not mean that you enjoy abuse. Shama also had the same inhibitions when she was told about her role. “When I read the script I asked Vikram (Bhatt) ‘Are these people mentally sick? Why do they want to be tortured like this?’ And he just replied, ‘no they are not sick, this is as natural to them as breathing’. It was a new concept to me,” she reveals. Bhatt, whose cinematic oeuvre for the past some years now has been erotica, horror or both, has decided to embrace the internet to give people Maaya, which many people are saying is the Indian Fifty Shades of Grey.