MUMBAI, May 1: The genesis of the Pooja Bhatt controversy lies in a small town in California. A few hours after Pooja presented herself at the crime branch today, the man in whose name the Bollywood.com web-site, from where Stardust claims to have downloaded the half-nude image of `Pooja Bhatt', was fast asleep.

When Express Newsline woke up Suvrit Varshney, an NRI from Delhi, it was 6:30 in the morning in Fullerton and he was completely ignorant of the controversy he had raked up back home.

It took Suvrit some time to comprehend the allegations. Why did he `head-change' the pictures of Bhatt? ``What the hell are you talking about, man,'' he says. It takes a little more backgrounder until it dawns on him that he is being accussed of having morphed Pooja Bhatt's head on a nude body. He sounds appalled. ``This must be a joke. You call me up at this time and give me this bullshit!'' he says. But isn't Bollywood.com registered in his name? He agrees that the site was established by him and a few friends, but insists that it was merely to provide information on Hindi movies. But why has the site been shut down, in that case? He explains that within a couple of months of starting the site, they realised that they did not have the funds to maintain it. ``Maintaining a website is very expensive and we hardly ever watch Hindi movies, so what the hell were we gonna do with the site?'' he says.

He adds that he transferred the site to a friend who was in the same boat. It never took off and has been defunct for a long time. How long? And it is here that he drops the biggest bombshell. The article in Stardust may lead you to believe that it was just recently that they had accessed Bollywood.com. But it turns out that the ``other day'' was not so recent at all. ``The site has been dead for the last eight months. The magazine is bullshitting. Also there is no way they could have seen the picture on our site because it was never there!'' he says.

But maybe he is lying about when the site was discontinued. He retorts that this fact can be easily verified as his site was registered with the service provider, Intellinet.com. ``Get on to the Net, go and check with them and see if I am lying,'' he says.

Survit is angry that his name and that of Bollywood.com has been brought into this sordid

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.