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RAKHI sawant: Reigning queen of reality shows?

Last week, two big ticket Reality TV shows were launched, and a third, “Sarkar ki Duniya” on REAL, reached its climax. Next week Sony TV launches “Is Jungle se Mujhe Bachao”, with an appropriate quota of creepy crawlies, remin iscent of “Khatron ki Khiladi”. And the channel already has a reality show running “Entertainment Ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega” whose title should have been, “Fame ke liye kuch bhi karega”. That would have explained what the genre is all about.

The big new shows on Colors and NDTV Imagine respectively are “India’s Got Talent” and “Rakhi Ka Swayamvar”. The latter is a wonderfully apposite metaphor for what the genre can achieve. Rakhi Sawant was unheard of before she went on a reality show on Sony barely two years ago. Then she became India’s most tireless famous-for-being-famous star, hugely in-your-face, and disarmingly publicity hungry. Disarming? Well, she has that quality. Now, having been created by Reality TV, she is here to crown herself its reigning queen. Move over, Shilpa Shetty.

Alongside her is another example of someone who has gone the same route. The first Big Boss had, besides Rakhi, Bhojpuri star Ravi Kissen who was big in Bihar but not elsewhere until he came to Boss’s House and made his presence felt. On “Rakhi ka Swayamvar” he is cast as her brother. (Even reality has to be contrived. Besides, in India all it takes is a 10-rupee rakhi to get you a brother.) And he interviews the actress’s prospective grooms with a chummy, nudge-nudge tell-me-all panache. When he is not bringing them down to earth. (“Five or six thousand rupees you are earning? People can’t buy a pair of shoes for that much.”)

A genre that hit the jackpot in India with “Kaun Banega Crorepati” in 2001 is still booming because it represents opportunity in so many ways. Every young person who watches it is possibly an aspirant in the making. And perhaps the best indicator of how an entertainment genre became the ordinary person’s ladder to success is the fact you have the New York Reality TV School. Its founder sums up very pithily what Reality TV does. It helps people “achieve their goals of winning and creating a television presence that will last a life time.” So what he does is train them in all that it takes. How to get selected on a show, how to achieve a presence once you are there. A business idea for anybody who wants to try it here.

Indians are exuberantly happy with the notion of television exposure. If we were ever a diffident people it must have been before satellite television. After it, the floodgates to maximum exposure have been pushed wide open. There is very little we will not do on television, and now we are ready to woo and be wooed on it, to interview prospective bridegrooms and be interviewed by them. Entertainment industry imaginations working overtime has resulted in a minor brainwave. Junk for the moment the tested route of franchising TV shows that have worked abroad and dig into Indian mythology for a workable idea. The contemporary take on Sita choosing a bridegroom from among the princes vying for her hand is Reality TV brassy star turning demure and interviewing aspirants for her hand in marriage in a kitschy Udaipur palace.

“Rakhi ka Swayamvar” may pall before long but for the moment it is irresistible. All the 12,000 plus who applied to be her suitors were definitely clear that this was a stab at at least passing fame. There is an NRI from Toronto, a fitness trainer from Bulandshahar, a businessman from Delhi, a police officer from Kashmir, an actor from Kanpur, and even an astrologer. Everybody is dressed in pretentious, ill fitting jackets, and they all loll about in faux royal surroundings. The bride on offer looks sculpted, tries simpering coyly, and then comes into her own in an hour add-on to the main show which comes on at 10.30 pm. On something called “Man ki Baat”, she begins to tell the show’s host how completely terrible her own family is, and cannot stop. “Rakhi ka Swayamvar” runs from 9 to 10.

If Reality TV is for the aam admi aspirant, what of fading stars or film personalities who haven’t lately been in the public eye? It is a proven comeback vehicle. You only have to ask Amitabh Bachchan.

Shekhar Kapur, Sonali Bendre and Kiron Kher are only the latest in the long string of film people who have decided that they have something to gain by being judges on a reality show. All three are on “India’s Got Talent”, working at least as hard as the contestants. Bendre, for instance, comes up with three completely different hairstyles in the course of a single episode that may have been shot on three different days. Dressing up for the role is terribly important for the judges.

If TV stars have less work because Reality TV is displacing so much other prime time programming, they have to look for a chance to be on it. It may be bad news for TV serial script writers too, but it is great news for channels. You don’t have to pay actors and writers for a long-running series, only cough up prize money at the end. They discovered that on US network television a long time ago.

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