When Ramesh Venkatesan realised that he wanted to be a woman as a teenager he was too ashamed to tell his family and friends.

He even pretended to be in love with a girl at his college in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Today, aged 28, he not only wears a sari and make-up openly in the street, but next month he will become the first transsexual host of an Indian television programme.

Using his female identity, Rose, he will anchor a Saturday evening talk show addressing sexual and other traditionally taboo issues on Star Vijay, a popular Tamil television channel.

“I want to set an example,” Mr Venkatesan, who plans to undergo sex reassignment in Thailand in the next few months, told The Times. “The transgender community here is totally disempowered. It is very closeted and doesn’t integrate at all. I wanted to join mainstream society.”

His show, called Ippadiku Rose (Yours Rose), is a sign of how Indian economic growth and integration with the West are slowly breaking down social taboos.

Transsexuals have been part of Indian society for hundreds of years and traditionally sing and dance for money at weddings and birthday parties. Though many still perform this way, declining demand and higher living costs have driven them to begging and sex work in recent years.

Mr Venkatesan, who comes from a middle-class family in Madras, said that he had no desire to live such a life. Knowing that his father, a property dealer, would disapprove, he suppressed his identity to complete his education at engineering college. When he went to do a masters degree in the US and his parents started looking for a wife for him, he came out.

“My mother broke down in tears and couldn’t handle it for a long time,” he said. When he returned to India in 2004 his father threw him out of the home but eventually allowed him to return. He can now wear women’s trousers, but not saris, at home. Dressed as a man, he found work as an American-accent coach at a call centre but later became a freelance software engineer so that he could work from home in women’s clothes.

Mr Venkatesan’s ambition, however, was to work in the media, and he approached several television stations with his talk-show idea. The first two laughed him off, but the third, Star Vijay, embraced the concept.

“We were planning a late-night talk show and Rose just walked into our office. We were really impressed,” Pradeep Milroy Peter, the channel’s head of programming, said.

Star Vijay is watched by more than 60 million people in Tamil Nadu and is available all around India as well as in the US and Singapore.

“We want to push the envelope, but we don’t want to go overboard,” Mr Peter said. “India is still very conservative. We have cryogenics and space rockets, but are still discussing whether to have sex education in schools.”

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