Posted by
Ech Kay
at
11:10 PM
"Reality Shows" (Be patient and please don't groan.. I know everyone seems to be discussing this shit nowadays, but I promise to keep you well-humoured right till the end of this post!) seem to be the in-thing nowadays. Right from Kaun Banega Crorepati, which brought in a refreshing change from the ubiquitous saas-bahu sagas; to MTV Roadies which changed the way the youth in India think (!) today; these reality shows seem to have everyone - old and young alike, hooked to them.
One such "reality show" MTV Splitsvilla, caught my attention of late (Yes, I owe an explanation for this. I implore you to be patient and read on till the end). The show revolves around 20 lasses (or rather, lasses with... er.. I leave that to your imagination) vying for the attention (did someone say love?) of two
What I make of it and what is obvious is, that the show had been planned with the sole aim of drawing as many eyeballs as possible. And why not! Twenty wanna(ba)bes.. Two lame-a*$ed guys who toss around these girls as if they were no better than their used underwear.. A dumb anchor with a dysfunctional wardrobe, who the gals (and a few guys too!) feel is "oh-so-cool".. Lots of skin on offer.. Isn't this the perfect recipe for boosting a channel's TRP rating?
MTV India has indeed succeeded in its efforts! There is no dearth of dumb-arsed testosterone-driven males in India, who have the time to watch any shit that is dished out before them. The sleazier the skin-show, the better. Yet for completely queer reasons, it is the female population that seems to be more interested in the show!
Someone rightly christened the television the "idiot box". In doing perfect justice to this age-old term, MTV India came up with the brilliant idea of Splitsvilla.
Where love is war... screams the tag line of the show. And again, WHAT CRAP? I wonder what kind of people MTV India recruits, to draft the content for their shows. To put it in a nutshell, Splitsvilla is a game of bitching, betrayal, back-biting, sex, politics, deceit, lust and all such words that one would generally see together only on the rear cover of a Sidney Sheldon novel! For a major part of the time that the camera rolls, the soundtrack is a cacophony of bleeps, which makes the viewing experience all the more repulsive. One need not be too brainy to deduce that, the show is stage-managed by the production crew, so as to make it look as glamorous (read stupid) as possible. I am reminded of the WWF fights which I was forbidden from watching as a kid. Weren't those fights also beautifully orchestrated, so as to arouse viewer interest? That the young viewers today don't comprehend this, speaks volumes of the mental level of the target audience. MTV India indeed seems to have taken idiotizing the youth to an altogether new level!Amidst all this shit, what makes me ponder is, weren't these contestants taught something called moral science at school? Or forget moral science, didn't their parents ever realize that they were responsible for inculcating the right values in their daughters? Weren't they ever told about "self respect"? The behaviour of the girls on air, reveals a great deal about the kind of upbringing that they have come through.
Moreover, I see a great deal of hypocrisy involved with the format of the show. I used to believe ( and I still do) that I had a progressive and ahead-of-my-time outlook towards most things, but after
Now before you get really restless, I'll come to why I decided to write about all this crap. Quite by
What made things funny was that, I had absolutely no idea that the girl who I met, had been a contestant on the MTV show. It was after this experience that I realized what "being blissfully unaware" actually meant! And to make matters worse (for the poor girl, of course!) I (unintentionally) made our conversation a forgettable experience for her. Well within our 70-second rendezvous, I managed to give her the feeling that the English she was speaking, was grossly incorrect; and that the annoying accent that she was trying to ape, was doing no good to conceal her apparent lack of knowledge of the language! So much for playing wannabe! These characters are far from being "real". Poor girl! No wonder she was "dumped" out of the show!!
-HK
11:10 pm; 26th August '08
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Labels:
bitching
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degrading values
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disgust
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idiot box
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MTV
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reality show
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shame
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Splitsvilla
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TRP
,
youth interest
3 comments:
Tht was one hell of a thing i wanted to say frm a long time.....
the name rox..SHITSVILLA !!!
I wish som1 frm the MTV unit reads ur blog...!
Or better....send it to the Hitvada !!!
[in little formal language though :)]
Great Stuff..HK..!!
But the 2nd edition of shitsvilla seems to arouse a lot of interest of viewers..!!
Well Now you know why the channel is called "empty we" :D
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