Funny man

MTV VJ Cyrus Broacha can get away with saying anything, finds Kavitha S. Daniel

He's reassuringly funny. The Peter Pan of the Indian entertainment industry, the lovable boy who never grew up. Truly, he can say anything and get away with it. The Raja of Rubbish, one magazine called him, a title he ostensibly loved.

MTV VJ, the "icon of Indian youth", Cyrus Broacha does not disappoint. Most of our interview can be summed up like this:

Cyrus: Gab, gab, gab...
Reporter: Ha, ha, ha...

He has a gag for every moment and then you wonder how he keeps it up. Does he never tire?
Replies the irrepressible Broacha, "You learn what not to do when you watch domestic television serials and Doordarshan (India's state-run TV channel).

"My wife and I were watching a new Hindi serial, Love & Marriage. It's crazy, they were actually enacting a tragic, teary scene but it was so funny... we were cracking up. At MTV, the difference is we're consciously trying to be funny and we like to think we succeed mostly."

MTV Bakra, his most popular show where he catches unsuspecting people off guard by pulling a gag on them, has spawned nearly 11 copies in different regional languages.

Luckily, Broacha has not been beaten up despite scaring tourists with horror stories about Mumbai and making fools of people on the streets. He has made a customer at a photo studio pose endlessly with a cricket bat and has handed a passerby two dripping ice-cream cones while he's busy doing what he loves most - jabbering.

"I've been hit a few times," he admits wryly. "But, the crew comes in very quickly. Even if I'm hit I cover my face and go down, after all we've humiliated the guy. But, 90 per cent of the time we don't have a problem. It's because I'm essentially a prankster and people are familiar with laughs before the candid camera."

His best bakra (victim) to date?

"I loved the one I did on the David Ogilvy of today - Trevor Dealty, the present guru of the advertising world. At a felicitation ceremony in Mumbai, I posed as a customs official and cornered him about not having his health checks done.

"I even brought out an injection and he really did not know. He was desperately trying to hold onto his liberal, open-minded outlook that we are one world and he's not in a Third World country. But, I could see him slowly disintegrate," recalls Broacha.

He continues, "We also did one with Govinda (Hindi film star) where we had two rustic north Indians badgering him with questions about his mother, aunt, and a host of relatives and friends and they hug him and leave. Then a bemused Govinda goes like: Yeh kaun thei? (Who were they?)"

What are his feelings about dishing out patient advice to people with torturous love problems in his other famous show, Loveline, hosted along with the leggy Malaika Arora? "Here they have people calling in and writing letters on how they should tackle being in love with a married man (sic) or how to win back the affections of a lost love."

Broacha says, "We don't have the credibility to give advice to these troubled people. We try to make it light. They are mostly people from small towns who have no one to talk to. It's sad really. We just try to give them a bigger picture."

According to Broacha, sometimes there are morbid situations which are not aired - like someone wanting to commit suicide. "We try to refer them to a helpline or a counsellor, but they are not comfortable. They prefer to call us up and for some reason they don't mind if it's aired for the whole world to hear," he says.