Like all the rest of you, we have spent the past few weeks salivating over the salacious advertisements for today’s Indian cultural extravaganza, Tamasha. While we suspected for the longest time, like so many others, that Zamana had just lifted a picture from the Internet after Googling “hot Indian girl.” But something about the smile and the jaw line made us suspect that the Tamasha girl was, in fact, Bwog contributor Liz Jacob, CC’13. Bwog’s Relentless Navel-gazing Bureau Chief Mark Hay caught up with Liz and pulled her off into a side room to have the following conversation:

Bwog: Oh my god, you’re the Tamasha girl!

Liz: Hah, yeah, I am.

Bwog: Well, now, how’d that happen?

Liz: Actually, it happened on Gchat – a few weeks ago someone from Zamana just asked me if I wanted to be on the posters for this year. And for a while I tried to convince her to use one of the other girls on the table, but … I just said yes. It was pretty quick.

Bwog: Wait, wait, there was a table of girls? How were they selected?

Liz: I don’t know. There are a lot of attractive girls on the Zamana board, so I think they just had a lot to work with.

Bwog: Okay, but you said yes. Didn’t you know what you were getting into?

Liz: Not really. … I showed up to the shoot and I mean, this is the first time I’ve “modeled” or anything, so I was a bit awkward during the whole thing. But we had a really great photographer and I think that’s the only reason I actually look that good in the pictures.

And actually, our media person, she kept telling me over and over, I didn’t Photoshop you at all! But actually in the beginning I had asked her if she could Photoshop a six pack on there, because I thought that might be cool.

But they had to … they … oiled me down with … cocoa butter – cocoa butter of all things! It was a bit weird. It wasn’t really until I got home afterwards that I sat down and thought, oh man, what did I do?

Bwog: Now that you’ve broken through, would you ever consider modeling or posing again?

Liz: Well, I don’t think the opportunity would ever come up again.

Bwog: Listen, sooner of later you’re going to have to wake up to the realization that the rest of the Columbia community has come to: you’re just plain hot. So this could well happen again.

Liz: Ah hah, no no no. I only did this because I’m really involved in Zamana and I’m invested in what happens to it. And I just don’t think that it’s something anyone else would ask me to do again.

Bwog: What if Bwog wanted you to pose for something?

Liz: I just don’t think that Bwog would want something like that …

Bwog: You’re sidestepping my question!

Liz: I don’t know. Probably not.

Bwog: How’s life for you as the Tamasha girl? Any indecent proposals?

Liz: When I was putting them up in a dorm a bunch of guys did ask me who the girl was and when I said it was me they all just started laughing – I’m not sure if that was because they felt awkward or what.

No one’s really recognized me on the street, though. I mean, I don’t look like that everyday. The only people who have really recognized me are my friends.

And actually, I saw my first one vandalized the other day. Someone had drawn hair on my stomach, which I was a bit offended by because that’s kind of gross. I mean I expected a moustache or something, but not that.

Oh, and my brother … because this is my Facebook profile picture for Tamasha … he keeps commenting with things like, take this down. This is not cool. But I don’t think he really minds that much.

Bwog: Yeah, what do your parents think of all this?

Liz: Um, I didn’t tell them at first because it all happened pretty quickly. And then later I told them I may have done something you’re not going to like, but they were totally cool with it. And later I showed them some of the pictures and they didn’t react. Like they didn’t expect anything more from me.

Bwog: Now that this whole ordeal is over, tell me true, are you going to keep one of these posters for posterity?

Liz: Yeah, definitely. I want to keep one so that in a few years, once I’ve had like fifteen kids, I can pull it out and show it to them and say see? I wasn’t always fat!