The New Reality

Looking back at the ‘70s Bollywood films, one can’t help feeling how crap some of them are. I mean, a woman having blood from three donors simultaneously through live chords!!!! I don’t think we have achieved such a medical monstrosity even today. They matched blood group to check parenting!!!
I mean, what did they take the audience for? They would know better if they were making films now. We don’t stand that kind of crap. No sir. We are much more intelligent now. We can point out in jiffy, what is utterly unrealistic in a film. We need what we see to be much closer to the truth. Sorry, a better word would be "reality".

We need to believe what we see.

Like…..a 4 year old girl crying since she was kicked out of competition with a hall full of spectators and a country full of TV viewers bare witnessing it. I mean, that’s how she would behave, right? If you told your little kid he was no good in front of his whole class, she is going to cry.

Of course a microphone in your hand and telecasting it live on TV would mean that she won’t be able to cry. She will have to put up a brave face and frantically wait for the camera to be shut off so that she can go to the hotel, have her ‘due’ share of beating from daddy and mummy for her failure (and theirs, as it happens), be over with the ordeal of seeing the parents blaming each other and then go to bed, so that she can cry alone for humiliation. It sounds sentimental, I know. In fact, TV reality shows (especially the ones involving kids) have been a villain for quite sometime now. And the pain the children bear for the reality shows have become a reality show by itself (Again, that's VERY good for TRP).
Actually, the fact that talent hunt/reality shows with kids can be immensely entertaining to us and encouraging towards the children at the same time, - Boogie Woogie showed us quite long ago. Although quite a few people debate about the kind of cultural exposure to the kids the show offers, nevertheless, it was at least, not an iron maiden. But, my argument is a little different here.
How did it come to this? I mean, someone just sat up in their bed one morning and thought “hey, crying children = great TRP”? I doubt if it happened that way. There was one time when reality shows(at least remotely related to what we have now) consisted of quiz competitions only. Then came American Idol weaved from the American dream – “A Nobody can be Somebody, provided he’s got balls.”
And made it big.
Soon enough, that gave birth to the ‘original’ idea of Indian Idol…..and the reality shows caught on. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what a reality show actually means. According to wikipedia, “Reality television is a genre of television programming that presents purportedly unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors, sometimes in a contest or other situation where a prize is awarded.”

If I may be so bold, this means reality shows should be closer to the truth than the silver screen. But the main problem with truth is, truth is relatively less in quantity, at least dramatic truths are. A man goes to the office one morning, does his job, comes back home, watches a little TV, plays with his kids and gets to bed. This is as close to truth as it gets, but will you sit down for an hour every week to see this? So, the TV channels resorted to the obvious option. They tried to make the ‘truth’ more exciting, consistently.

A group of celebrities were locked up together in a house and made to do their household chores. And we KNOW celebrities are lazy people, they don’t move a finger to do any household chores if they can help it, right? And bingo!! There they are, tearing each others heads off, trying to shirk duties. How can we not believe it, when we knew it all along?

Then an item queen announced that she would choose her husband on live TV!!! Men queued up with near fantastic CVs and amazingly mature, politically correct views. There were some MCPs of course, they were duly bashed by the bride and occasionally some sensitive bloke who brought tears to her eyes. Finally after a month long of interviews, aerobics and street theatre, a man was selected. He looked beside himself with happiness. And he suddenly became so possessive, cruel and insensitive that the poor item queen had to declare after a week that they were not mentally compatible and the wedding was off!!!
Another one was about couples, or rather, wedding itself. A few middle-class betrotheds were each given 3 million dollars or something like that for planning their wedding. And getting the money they became so extravagant, they were soon asking for more as they couldn’t manage an upper middle class Indian wedding within 3 million dollars. If the TV channel was trying to prove that no matter how much we have, we ask for more, a price of 3 million dollars for that is……. a bit on the steeper side, I would say.
Then we had mother swapping, lie detector tests, stranded on remote islands….you name it, they had it.
Gradually, the gap between truth and reality began to increase. And then at one point, when a reality show was analysing celebrities’ last births, it was so far away from truth, it was probably reaching it from the other side.

Still, Candid Camera and Amazing race were also reality shows.
Moreover, we got artists like Shreya Ghoshal and Sunidhi Chauhan from Talent hunts. Talent hunts do give the young, unknown talents a quite big platform. But, the problem is that now ALL we get are reality shows which are lame copies of one another. Was that worth giving up the dreams like Nukkad, Zabaan Sambhalke, Detective Karam Chand or Tehkikaat, - altogether?
They shone, because dreams can be what you want them to be. But the truth is….well, just the truth. It has endless possibilities, yes. But most of them are not favourable for TRP. The select few which indeed are, have been repeated so many times that they have become mundane.
And do you know the most pathetic part of this? Lets go back to the kid who has been just kicked out of a competition in front of millions in spite of trying better than her best. She is putting up a brave face in front of all of us in which, she believes we cannot see the tears she is holding back with so much pain. And what do you think about that leaning back on your sofa in front of the TV, with a cup of coffee in your hand?

“Ahh!! Its all scripted.”