Another One Bites The Dust

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

As the lights dimmed and he headed back to his ‘make-up’ room, he looked back once again to the stage to see the last remnants of his dignity. He had just done a scripted-to-look-impromptu dance with a former leading lady who appeared on his show to promote her comeback movie. He used to be the biggest superstar in the country and now he has to suffer a thousand indignities everyday being a circus monkey for people he wouldn’t even have looked at when he was at the peak of his career. People who only are allowed to appear on his show because he needs them. His first teevee show gave the channel enough ratings to keep them on the top for a decade. Now, to attract a decent audience, he needs to use people with sad stories to sell as a crutch. His father was right: if you want people to stop caring about you, grow old.

One of the most popular tropes on twitter among people who don’t have anything funny or original to say is to make a ‘joke’ about someone in the news being a contestant on Bigg Boss. This sort of came true last week when commode enthusiast and alleged cartoonist Aseem Trivedi became a contestant on that show. Because the best way to fight injustice is to participate in a show famous for playing psychotic mind games with its contestants and is moderated by a man whose career is dedicated to making bullying seem kitschy-cool! Trivedi made so much noise about being in jail and when he was freed he voluntarily entered a large compound in which he, along with other inmates, has to follow a rigid set of rules – which if broken invite their own set of penalties, receive food rations barely enough for sustenance, and can only exit when asked to do so by a presiding authority. Well played! Seems like all our modern messiahs want to do is become famous enough to get on teevee.

Of course, in India, the shortest route to fame - other than leading a vague protest against the government’s policies - is to become a contestant on a reality show. We love the people on reality shows! Sure, we forget about them the minute the current season of the show ends, but electing a proper Indian Idol is more important than electing a proper government.

And we have a whole spate of reality shows to choose from! You have your regular talent shows, in which people who didn’t succeed in their actual chosen profession select people who are going to fail in theirs. Nowadays, most of these shows have turned into a contest to determine who is more poor and desperate. Will you vote for the grocery vendor from a village without electricity situated deep inside the Himalayan mountains whose parents have to trek 200 kilometres just to catch a glimpse of their only offspring on teevee or would you vote for the orphan from the streets of the badlands of UP who survived famine, caste war, family feuds, dacoit recruitment officers and Anu Malik’s poetry to reach the finale. Why wouldn’t you help them achieve their lifelong dream of winning a show that didn’t exist until a month ago, you monster? Some shows also feature celebrities – and by celebrities I mean anyone who might have appeared in a movie or television show or had their photo appear in the newspaper that one time  – dancing and singing away, shamelessly asking their ‘fans’ to vote for them. Perhaps the only thing more pathetic than contestants on reality shows assuming that they have fans is people on twitter assuming that those who follow them actually give a crap about which first world problem prevented them from sharing their bon mots with the rest of the world. Even the scripted banter on these shows is more banal and cliché ridden than Ravi Shashtri’s commentary.

Then there are a zillion ‘crime shows’ which portray crude dramatizations of real-life incidents while the anchor pops in after every scene to give a very serious monologue requiring very serious background music. Judging by the ratings of these shows, it seems India really loves watching ‘people like us’ suffer fatal consequences for bad decisions.

The worst of the lot are those interchangeable ‘youth-centric’ shows. Their basic conceit is to humiliate everyone involved in the show on national television. A whole generation has been brought up watching these shows, confusing notoriety with fame. Possessing a real talent has been replaced by possessing an ability to bully, cajole, outwit or seduce. Bonus points if you get bleeped every two seconds.

Perhaps that is going to be this generation’s teevee legacy: a bunch of illiterate people shouting the f-word at each other, completely devoid of any context.

From movie star circle jerks to statues that need to be covered

(This first appeared in the Sunday Guardian)

Celebrities: They’re famous! They’re brave! They collect admirers like normal people collect calories!

Star World’s Luv 2 Hate U is a new show in which your favourite celebrities confront the biggest threat to their existence: someone on the internet. Welcome to another link in the daisy chain of movie industry circle jerking, in which yet another actor gets together with his friends and enemies and all of them reflect in their nauseatingly fake mutual admiration and conjoined awesomeness. Hosted by the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz (or as you humans call him, Arjun Rampal), the show is like a famous person’s wet dream come true. They get to meet someone, who, they perceive, hates them irrationally. If only they could just talk to their haters! Then they could show the hater the error of their ways and both the former hater and the celebrity can ride off into the sunset, basking in their new found love & respect for each other. A few weeks ago this show featured India’s most popular bad sentence writer, Chetan Bhagat. A man who is proud of the fact that he has never met a compound conjunction that he has liked. The show enabled him to showcase his two favourite versions of himself: a victim of the critics and the choice of the new generation, both of which are a by-product of his delusions of grandeur. Some people say that Bhagat has made non-readers interested in reading. That’s like saying the ISI has been encouraging local tourists to visit India.

Chetan Bhagat and the Mercedes Benz brand go together like SIlvio Berlusconi and a vow of fidelity.

Bhagat is the closest thing the Indian twittersphere has to an arch-nemesis. You can be sure of three things in life: death, corruption and the fact that Chetan Bhagat will tweet something dumb every few weeks and cause an avalanche of bad jokes. A Chetan Bhagat joke is like the teacher who asks for a “red pen of any colour”. Everyone claims to have one of their own. This week, however, he was more of a willing participant in someone else’s bad decision. Inexplicably, luxury car maker and the preferred brand of 80s era movie villains, Mercedes Benz, chose Bhagat as a brand ambassador. Mercedes spent all that money hiring a marketing team and this is the best idea they had? What’s next, hiring the penguin from the batman comics to be the mascot of a “save the penguins” campaign?

Hide your inaccurate television psephologists, it’s election season in India! The election commission, in all it’s wisdom, decided that UP’s various Mayawati statues have to be covered with tents so that they do not influence the voter in the upcoming assembly elections. Twitter was abuzz with various conspiracy theories, but it seems like this is just another government department treating the Indian voter as an impressionable little child. Everyone must be mollycoddled, because they can’t be trusted to make their own decisions! Just like imparting sex education to teenagers will make them want to spend more sexytime with each other, instead of helping them become well-rounded adults. This country is being governed by a generation which most probably still refers to bodily functions in numerical form. Such cognitive dissonance leads to absurd situations like when an English movie channel broadcasted a film about gay rights while censoring the words “gay” and “homosexual.”

Speaking of living in the distant past, this month the Madhya Pradesh government’s new draconian bill banning cow slaughter is scheduled to be notified. You got to hand it to the BJP government in power in that state. It takes real cojones to look at the problems this country is facing and think ‘there’s nothing that a cow-slaughter ban won’t fix.’ The BJP is a party of difference in that no matter what the problem is, it makes no difference to it’s policies. If the people who claim to revere cows really cared about them, then these holy bovine creatures wouldn’t have been roaming our streets like an orphan from a Dickens novel.

Of course, banning something in India means that it will not happen. That is why every 15th August I read a chapter from the Satanic Verses to paintings of naked goddesses whilst drinking whiskey and resting my feet on the bust of a revered ancient king.