Big Brother finally has an Audience

For the longest time I skilfully avoided contact with Big Brother, secretly disapproving of the intellectual hollowness and the social ineptitude of the audiences the show attracted. I falsely believed that our own lives must certainly contain the requisite modicum of hope, despair, joy, sorrow, anger, frustration, delirium and the many other emotions that collectively make up for a real existence. But fads are fads. And riding on the popularity wave of reality TV a lot of us did tune up to Big Brother ...in one country after another.

And then one day I found myself utubing Big Brother - trying to figure out the furore about Shilpa Sethi and racism.

For those of you who have dodged the world headlines in the past three days let me give a one minute recap. Shilpa Sethi, a B Grade Bollywood Actress, decided to join the Big Brother House in the UK production of Channel 4. I believe she is the first Indian, if not the first non-Brit to appear on the show in UK. Don't know what she expected, but what she received was hostility, jealously, and hatred. According to the rules of the TV program she could not make any contact with the outside world for as long as she is a housemate. Hence she had to deal with the bullying and the racism on her own. But she was not alone in feeling the undercurrents of this hostility. Within 3 days, OfCom (independent regulator of UK communication industries) received more than 30,000 complaints about the racist behaviour of the other female housemates towards Shilpa and urged Ofcom to censure Channel 4. The matter was raised in the House of Commons. Effigies were burnt in the streets in India and the prime minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, had to publicly defend the multicultural fabric of his country on a foreign tour - ironically in India.

I've been bemused by the program, its audiences, and now finally this controversy. Really, I don't understand what's the story here. Is it about racism? Is it Indian lobby? Is it TV standards and the responsibility of TV producers to appropriately censor things?

Racism is wrong. Unacceptable. However, it is equally unacceptable to the intelligent mind to assume there is no racism in the real world. There is some in every country - certainly in the UK and especially towards the thriving Asian communities. But then Big Brother is a "reality" TV show. It is a mirror of the society as it exists – not as it should exist. The housemates are normal people trying to live a normal life (in a controlled environment). I don’t expect them to be role models for our next generations nor future ambassadors for UNHCR. Some of the housemates are going to be racist, some gay, some spoilt, some sober, some creative artists and some simply wankers. Without this diversity life would be boring. I say what is said in the House remains in the House. Unpopular housemates will be voted out by the more sensible ones – or so I hope.

What is truly a sad about the reality of the society we live in is that we have not spent much time lamenting the ten lives (including that of a 2 year old) that were lost today to the wind storms in this country. That to me is a lot more offensive than any racist innuendos that has embroiled medias the world over.