With a dozen hits under your belt when you’re just 19, there’s no need to be bashful. And Hansika Motwani, who’s enjoying a dream run in Tamil and Telugu, knows this better than the rest. “I’m a very contented person,” she begins, as she confidently says her eyes are set firmly on south Indian films now.

“My mother thought I should have been born south Indian because of my food preferences, but now I am happy to become one of them by acting in their films,” she says. The actor, who now has five big films lined up for release in Tamil and Telugu this year alone, says she knows she has miles to go and milestones to achieve in the film industry, but is set on doing complete entertainers now.

Reams of paper have already been spent discussing the sudden transformation of the child artiste of Koi Mil Gaya to the Aap Kaa Surroor bombshell, after hibernating for a few years. Yet, discussions about her physical personality seem far from over. Just two films old in Tamil, Motwani has already got critics calling her a Kushboo- in-the-making. Even if it was Motwani’s plump personality that largely likened her to the south Indian actor, who had a temple in her name, she remains unruffled. “I am no model to be starving thin.

I am an actor. I want to look healthy. I am normally built and am happy about it,” she says. But films are serious business, and mildly altering her personality to play the part is only expected of her, she concedes. “In Tamil films Velayudham and Oru Kal Oru Kannaadi, my role is that of a village belle and a traditional south Indian woman respectively, and I thought I had to look plumper. But in Engeyum Kadhal, in which I play a girl living abroad, I knew I had to look slimmer.” These are necessary changes, but trying hard to be thin always is passé, she concludes.