World | India
The dark side of reality television shows
The desire to escape small town ennui by finding instant stardom on a reality television show has so mesmerised some young Indians that they resort to dangerous extremes if they fail.
- By Amrit Dhillon, Correspondent
- Published: 23:32 September 26, 2008
New Delhi: The desire to escape small town ennui by finding instant stardom on a reality television show has so mesmerised some young Indians that they resort to dangerous extremes if they fail.
Tania Shah, 21, consumed pesticide in the washroom of a Kolkata museum where auditions were being held because she had failed to make the grade.
Reports about the incident are still sketchy but eye-witnesses suggest that Shah called her mother from the washroom on her mobile and told her that she was committing suicide because she had been rejected.
She was found in a heap on the washroom floor, foaming at the mouth. Shah was rushed to hospital where her condition is said to be critical.
Watchman's death
The producers of the show were in the news last month too over the death of a watchman who worked at the Ritz Hotel in a Calcutta suburb where filming for their reality show, Fatafati, had just been completed.
After remonstrating with the television crew for being drunk, Prasun Adhikari, 23, was allegedly beaten up and pushed off a fifth floor balcony by the crew. Three crew members have been charged with murder.
A craze for singing and dancing reality shows has gripped small-town, middle-class Indian families. Ever since the launch of the Indian version of American Idol, they have been besotted either with watching young men and women perform on reality shows or egging on their own children to participate.
A million fantasies of becoming a singer or dancer in Bollywood are being played out on these shows every night of the week. They attract mammoth audiences.
Viewers' attraction
Viewers enjoy the raw emotions. The camera goes in close up and lingers cloyingly on young people's faces as they register fear, anxiety, joy or sadness.
The finale earlier this year of a programme called Sa Re Ga Ma Pa drew almost 105 million text votes from the audience.
"Viewers love the feeling that they have the power to catapult someone into superstardom. They identify with the contestants. Indians are very emotional and they become very involved," says media critic Pallavi Ghosh.
Another 25 million tuned in to watch two young girls slug it out on the Star Voice of India earlier this year. Reality show producer Gajendra Singh was flooded with more than 150,000 audition tapes when he announced that he was casting for his Chak de Bachche show. The producers of another talent show, Boogie Woogie, receive 4,000 tapes a month.
Accustomed to pushing their children to perform well at school, many middle class parents appear to have little idea about child psychology or the fragility of a child's personality when millions are watching their earnest efforts.
"For small-town families, it's a shot at fame and money which they never had before. They pressurise their children - some are just six years old - to perform and have no idea of how harmful it can be for a child to be criticised in public," says Mumbai child psychiatrist Hema Bhansal.
The sting of a public rebuke from one of the celebrity judges on a reality show shown in a West Bengal channel reduced 16-year-old Shinjini Sengupta to tears in July. The judge said her dancing was "mediocre and disappointing".
As millions watched, Sengupta, struggling with her humiliation, tried to recover her self-control.
In a few seconds, she went from being a smiling and radiant girl to a sobbing mess.
Later, at her Kolkata home, in a mysterious attack of paralysis, she stopped moving and talking and was unable to recognise her parents.
Shinjini's parents took her to a Bangalore hospital for neurological treatment. She returned home this week but her father says that she is still scarred.
Newspapers have reported cases of children running away from home after judges' rejection or falling into depression, stories highlighting the dark side of Indian reality television.
Child psychologists are alarmed at emotionally immature children having to cope with the pressure to perform and public criticism. Producers often urge the judges on the panel to be withering in their comments so that audiences sympathise with the child's distress.
Going against the grain
The new trend for pushing children onto these shows baffles Bhansal. "Traditionally, Indian mothers are notorious for pampering and babying their sons right into adulthood. That effectively prolonged their childhood. Now they've gone to the opposite extreme - depriving children of their childhood," she says.
Sengupta's case prompted the National Commission for Human Rights in New Delhi to investigate the treatment of children on reality shows.
Disturbed by the recent incidents, the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights has recommend that children below the age of 16 should be barred from participating in these shows.
Do you think the craze for Reality TV stardom in India will ever die down? Do winners of reality TV shows actually attain 'stardom' or are they just limited to being a flash in the pan?
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