“Please don’t speak about religion, politics, caste, community over here. And don’t discriminate on these.” A group of people stand around this person and agree with him, looking disapprovingly at the person he’s talking to. No one disagrees. Everyone thinks it’s wrong to discriminate on these parameters.
Did a politician actually stick his neck out and say so, and you missed it? No. It was actually someone who is beamed into far more homes than any politician, currently at least. When I say beamed in, I mean on a television screen and not through a hologram. This person whom most people would not have heard of—and I definitely hadn’t till 11 October 2015—is a television actor called Suyash Arora. He’s a contestant on that epitome of good behaviour—Bigg Boss 9.
You know that the end of days is nigh when the contestants of Bigg Boss 9 seem to be better human beings and citizens than people outside it. The last few days of Bigg Boss have left me eating my words—although I’m sure it won’t be for too long— about how it is the lowest format of entertainment ever, peopled with contestants who fit the show’s ethos perfectly.
While out here in the real world we’ve been reeling from absurd displays of intolerance and bullying, the world of pop culture—which frankly has more of an impact on people than politics—has shown us a world which John Lennon would have been proud of singing about.
So here are some lessons in being a tolerant and good human being which hopefully audiences will have noticed, more than the cries of Pakistan jaao (go to Pakistan), which have been renting the air.
Don’t make foreigners who’ve come to work and live in India feel like outsiders: This season’s Katrina Kaif-lookalike is Mandana Karimi. She’s from Iran. When she muttered something in Iranian—where she called someone a scarecrow she claimed —one of the other contestants, Rishabh, asked her to leave Bigg Boss and go back to Iran if she had to keep speaking in her dialect.
Immediately everyone pounced on him, telling him that he can’t tell Karimi to go back to Iran and speak to her in this manner. Now, Mandana is a common hate point for all the contestants, but all differences were put aside and friends and foes stood up for her collectively when they felt she was being discriminated against.
Maybe Subramanian Swamy and his gang of merry men and women could do with watching this show.
Don’t make NRIs feel like they don’t belong in India: Priya Malik, who seems to have decided to make a career out of taking part in the Bigg Boss franchise—she earlier took part in Big Brother Australia—was told that she should go back to Australia and that Australians use toilet paper to wipe their bottoms (which may not be a lie, but is an unnecessary statement). Once again, the person who said this, Kanwaljeet Singh, who’s the oldest contestant on the show, was told to stop talking rubbish instantly and stop picking on her.
This despite the fact that Malik is immensely disliked by other contestants. Singh was also told that he should recognise that Malik had represented India as the sole Indian participant in the Big Brother Australia house, so making her feel non-Indian in India is a little stupid.
That you can’t use your old age to demand respect and get away with being obnoxious: Kanwaljeet Singh, who is supposedly a designer of repute, and is way older than the other contestants has been spouting quite vile comments about all the women in the Bigg Boss house. But each time he’s done so, he’s been ticked off and told not to use his age as an advantage point or to assume that he won’t be called out on his prejudices just because he’s 60 years old. Imagine that. What a revolutionary thought. That respect has to be earned and not expected, just because you’re old.
Homosexuals are not oddities: Kanwaljeet Singh is gay. Which isn’t a big deal. What is a big deal is the manner in which other contestants speak of his sexuality. While criticising his aggressive behaviour, they also said that he needs to be cut some slack because he’s genuinely a nice person and that it must have been difficult for him to come out as gay after many years of marriage, that coming out as gay openly in India is very difficult and he must have been put through the wringer.
Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if one of our politicians or mainstream actors came out as gay? Forget coming out as gay. Maybe our film directors and politicians should all tune into Bigg Boss 9 to learn a lesson or two.
It’s rarely that I come to praise Bigg Boss instead of burying it, but I seriously believe that the not-so-exemplar contestants in the house deserve a round of applause for propagating a brotherhood of man and a world living as one.
Of course, I’m not holding my breath about Bigg Boss providing a moral science lesson for audiences unendingly, because I’m sure they’ll be spitting in each other’s food soon enough. And it is Apocalypse Now if a reality show seems to be more accepting of people’s religion, sexual orientation, caste and community than the real world is. Come to think of it, it may just be safer for Aamir Khan and Kiran Rao to shift domicile into the Bigg Boss house for now.
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