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The Review

The Gutter Syndrome!

TV goes trashy for TRP’s…

Who would have thought!

That a day will come when ‘icky & yucky’, ‘soiled & smutty’, ‘uncouth & unwholesome’ would be the tags tied to Indian Television! The little box weaned India away from all other forms of entertainment, including films and it became the pulse of countless homes, who cried with it, laughed with it, you could even say – breathed and throbbed with it! In turn, it became the biggest home-entertainer ever!

But today, a shadow is looming large over it!

Today, it is caught in a strange whirligig – it’s like some dark magnet is pulling it and pulling it so hard that it is changing its face to beyond recognition. Indeed, the TV we have known has changed its stripes, more so in the last 2-3 years and that is climaxing today to something totally vomitous and vile.

It is struck by the Gutter Syndrome!

And the symptoms are there for anyone to see. A sizeable part of it has started smelling foul and what once had the hues of a wholesome home-entertainer is acquiring ugly contours in the name of ‘edgy’ entertainment. This word ‘edgy’, often bandied about by channels and producers, seems to be just a euphemism for the outrageous and the unsavoury. It’s a mask for sharp-shooters, itching to make a fast buck by pursuing the cult of sensationalism that they are trumpeting as the edgy form of entertainment.

So we are afflicted with shows that are trafficking trash to unsuspecting, gullible millions who, in turn, are being benumbed in their sensibilities by this onslaught!

One of the most recent examples of it is this fish-bowl, voyeuristic show that postures itself as a peep into Human Psychology. But under that fa�ade and pretext, what is really happening in the show is nothing but scandalous spats and uncouth occurrences.

Indeed, Bigg Boss has crossed all limits of decency and the way things are happening in there makes many to cry ‘Fake & Phoney’! From the various internet fora to letters of the GR8! readers, it is being openly alleged that the whole Bigg Boss brouhaha is stage-managed. They discern a systematic pattern there. For instance, a Kamal Khan goes all guns blazing in his first appearance and is at his nastiest best, but when he comes back after elimination, he turns into a travesty of his former belligerent self and is tame and tinny like a goat.

In the same way, the second coming of Dolly Bindra in the Season-4 is a far cry from her spitfire self, when she came for the first time in the show. Besides, most conveniently for the audience, the Gharwaalas keep talking to the camera and vomiting out their bile about each other.

All this sham is always more than evident in all things Bigg Boss – a Sarah Khan sighs and swoons over an Ashmit Patel like – as said a GR8! Reader - ‘a cow in heat’, but then, suddenly, the beau turns into – hold your breath – a brother of hers and the entire farce moves to the second act where the fake Shaadi (fake, because in reality, it had already been solemnised quite some time back) of Sarah and Ali is celebrated and the whole thing is such a scream really, making asses of the audience with impunity.

But anyway, stage-managed or not is almost beside the point here in what we have to talk about. What galls us no end, is the kind of scenes being created by the likes of Dolly Bindra in there. You can, perhaps, condone sham, but you cannot turn a blind eye over the muck being raked in the foulest of language possible and beamed on National Television – no way!

The exemplary Dolly Bindra, playing the cantankerous shrew to the hilt, makes all hell break loose on the likes of Ashmit Patel, Shweta Tiwari, Manoj Tiwari and what have you. The words she spits out at them could never have echoed in your living rooms, but for Bigg Boss!

‘Shweta Ki ‘Uss’Mein Ghus Jao’, she tells Manoj Tiwari, but it is with Ashmit that she is always at her most malevolent best. The man also provokes him like nobody business… ‘Talk to my hand’ he smirks at her and she screams – ‘Apne Haath Ko Apni **** Mein Daal De!’ At this, he makes an amendment, ‘Ok, talk to my finger!’ and she thunders – ‘Finger daalna R*ya S*n Ki Uss Mein Jaake… MMS, Toh Tuune Khuub Banaya Tha…!’ Here is another nugget – ‘I won’t call you a loser, I’ll call you an ‘L’!’