|
Bigg Boss 2
The Human Zoo…
Rating *
If borrowing (and stealing, too) were a race, then Indian Television would win it hands down. The amount of foreign concepts that have been siphoned into our TV is so huge that makes you wonder somewhat darkly as to whether we have a shred of creativity in us or not.
Bigg Boss, too, has been Xeroxed from UK’s Big Brother and in turn, brings in all the yucky elements of the English show. Actually, if you look at it, that’s a zoo concept with humans in place of animals. A bunch of oddballs is herded and huddled in an enclosure for 12 weeks for the viewers to eye, ogle and enjoy, just like the visitors do it at a zoo. Oh yes, there is one difference – the toilet seat and the shower are kept away from our eyes unlike in the zoos, where we can be a witness to even that. That’s a small mercy we should be thankful of.
But all else in visible and audible to us through a battery of cameras and lapel mikes that the participants have to compulsorily wear. If that is not a celebration of voyeurism, what is? Without going into the ethos of invasion into privacy, it is as plain as the nose on your face that such a show can only breathe on the lungs of sleaze, shock and sensation. That’s what the Big Brother abounds in, where even physical intimacy of the extreme kind can occur and be exposed to the viewers.
Surely, the Indian hybrid cannot possibly go that far. But to compensate that, they have fished for some highly controversial people. Thereby, you have the allegedly mafia moll Monica Bedi, besides others like, Rahul, the reportedly astray son of Pramod Mahajan and Raja Chaudhary, the supposedly wife-beater. The hope at the makers’ end is that the negativity of disrepute that precedes them will attract eyeballs.
But all that seems to have fallen flat on its face. Despite the controversial clutter, the crowd assembled this time is a let down. They just don’t make exciting copy or come out as interesting people in this kind of a format. So what you are left with is a Rahul, a Monica or a Raja breaking into pathetic attempts to change their images by their goody-goody acts in the House. This results in a lot of sham bechari/bechara stances that take the show nowhere.
In its previous season at Sony, Bigg Boss had the novelty factor for Indian viewers, but now that is gone. To cap it the Bigg Boss tasks selected for those in the House are woefully tepid, like a paathshala with apri Gujju Ben Ketaki Dave as its principal. It all zeroes down to a dank and dumb fare.
Out of the odd assortment, the joker of the pack is Rahul Mahajan, whose stances of courtesy border on the ridiculous. Item-girl Sambhavana Seth, coming in as an answer to Rakhi Sawant of the previous season, struts about picking up bones of contention with the netaji Sanjay Nirupam (the first to be nixed out of the show) and others.
Rakhi Vijjan is too melodramatic to come out as genuine and Raja is all bottled up. We do have some bright moments from Ketaki Dave, but Ahsan Qureshi, with his infantile tukbandi (limericks) and that quaint style of elongating the last syllable of his sentence, is irritating, to put it mildly.
Others are hardly worth a mention, barring perhaps Kaushik who comes out as a silent plotter and that makes him interesting at times. However, his lacklustre personality does him in and he comes across as hardly the stuff to hook you onto the show.
In sum, it’s a tedious tent, full of tiresome people. Indeed, if you do decide to go with this kind of voyeuristic exercise, these are hardly the people you would like to gawp at.
The show is being anchored by Shilpa Shetty and she does bring some effervescence to it by her spontaneous abandon. But then, dotting each week of tedium with one bright spot would hardly fill the bill.
Technically speaking, it is the usual muli-camera affair. The set is big but there is nothing innovative about it. At times, the soundtrack gets distortions, which is so surprisingly sloppy in a show of this scale.
When you switch off after Bigg Boss finishes (that is, if you haven’t done it already) and ask yourself a question, ‘Why did I see it?’… the answer would be more difficult to find than the cure of Aids.
- Vierendra Bhargav
|
