The show’s pitch, pitting the best and the brightest US engineering students against each other to create a device that would mimic certain skills of select animals, greatly appealed to the animal lover in Kamal. If there’s one thing Kamal loves to interact with, she says, it’s with animals.

Take how she enthuses after encounter with a dolphin: "After feeling its skin up close, I was spellbound. There was something magical to it. I could relate it to something like a shelled hard-boiled egg, if you could imagine it. It’s sort of like rubbery, not slimy at all. And, of course, it’s just like you want to hug it."

Hosting Chasing Nature, Discovery Channel’s brand new show, was like a glove in hand for the beauteous Kamal. The show requires the students to emulate the way certain animals move, the likes of Brahminy Kites, the battering Ram, archer fish, scorpion, orangutan, giraffe, viper, chameleon, lion, dolphin, sloth, the kangaroo, and the bat.

But the difficulty lies in the fact that the students have to complete their work in a week’s time. And to top it all off, the students would have to perform the movements themselves using the devices they created. Fortunately, a professional stunts and special effects team is on hand to assist them. It was pretty torturing, indeed, for the student participants, but at the same time exciting, Kamal relates in an overseas phone interview with Asian journalists.

"The difficulty (in the show) comes in two ways," Kamal explains. "One is actually building the mechanism. And the other one is the performance of it, you know, actually taking part in the stunt.

"Once they’ve built it it’s not sort of like done and over for them. They’ve got to perform it in a stunt. In terms of physical difficulty, there was the orangutan, the brachiation technique of the ape family that uses the arm-over-arm swinging motion. That was very heavy, physically heavy for the students on their bodies and so they actually had to adapt the mechanism."

Those who remember Kamal as the sexy, sultry, quite naughty, counterpoint to the sweet-faced Nadya during the early days of MTV Asia in the mid-Nineties should have no problem associating her with a brain-teaser show like Chasing Nature. Even when just introducing mindless music videos, Kamal exuded intelligence to spare. She was always witty and quick with the repartee, commanding the small screen with a siren’s smirk, smoldering under her skin in a way no VJ since has. One can just imagine how she’ll whip the whiz kids of Chasing Nature in line.

When asked if there were certain requirements in choosing the students, Kamal says there was really none. "I think it really had to do with the capabilities of the students and their personalities, obviously, make a big difference, sort of how interesting and engaging they are as individuals and, of course, how able, capable they are as engineers as well. And I think a big dynamic that comes into play is their ability to work as a team together. That’s very important."

For someone who loves to travel and is big on the sciences, Kamal should be in her element in Chasing Nature. For us, the show is certainly one way of catching up with this beguiling beauty’s charms.