While the police in United States and the United Kingdom keep a special lookout for men hauling rucksacks, in India, especially the metros, they have been peering into people's cell phones.

The long arm of the law silently watches over the shoulders of people to catch them "red-handed" watching porn, which is not illegal, but any form of promotion by forwarding/hosting (the technical word is multimedia messaging or MMS) can invite a jail sentence and a heavy fine.

Reports are trickling in from everywhere--outside discos, pubs, bus-stops, pavements, colleges. Some policemen have been brazen enough to catch anybody with a cell phone, which is quite easy as there are more than 50 million users in India, and ask to be shown all files, hidden or not, even though this might be beyond the law itself.

The latest fillip to the phenomenon that has made the police hyperactive has been caused by an actress called Mallika Sherawat, who is also trying to make an impression in the West by starring in a Jackie Chan movie and making a bold appearance at the Cannes film festival.

Some technology driven person who could be sitting anywhere in the world morphed Sherawat's picture onto a porn video, uploaded it into a cell phone and in a blink the MMS was everywhere.

The upset actress, who was shooting somewhere abroad, called everyone she knew, including the press, her agents, officials, ministers, film producers and actors, which only heightened interest in the video.

The morphed body has turned out to be that of a Mexican girl, while nobody can trace the originator.

Beyond questions of law and morality, the mobile service providers are getting richer. In India, MMS messages are estimated to be less than 1% of the total number of text messages sent.

But on days when there is talk of a porn clip, on the sly, for real or morphed, traffic increases dramatically, and so do revenues.