So Bigg Boss wraps up this season having announced its first female winner last night. This was the first season that I saw and I watched every episode except the one in which Bunty got evicted. My first thoughts, when comparing it with its UK original and the U.S. Franchise (Big Brother in both countries and pretty much all over the english-speaking world) was that the contestants seemed to have been picked from a much smaller pool here.
Everywhere else part of the fun lay in watching a motley crew of everyday people, like me and you presumably, in those situations and how we, as mildly recognizable "types", coped with the various trials and tests inherent in the nature of the show. Bigg Boss, instead took to picking people who had some amount equity in the public square. There were television starlets, people who had achieved a certain amount of fame (or in a couple of cases infamy) in their chosen field and of course a subset of all these included people who were looking to use this as a platform to launch their careers in Bollywood.
Why is this? Did the producers decide that audiences would not be interested in watching people like them? Ordinary, office-going, housewiving people?
As for the finale, I'm sure there are many who are just relieved that a boorish, loutish, conniving, manipulative, risible, muck-racking, delusional specimen like Dolly Bindra came nowhere near the award.
Of the four finalists, I must say that I'm pretty happy with Shweta Tiwari winning the whole thing. She arguably faced the most trying time (her first confrontation with Dolly Bindra in the living area being the highlight) among all contestants and she rarely engaged in the pastimes with which all other house-members were keeping themselves busy.
And considering this is an audience selected winner its also heartening to see that the one who had the most evolved model of the star-fan dynamic ultimately won. She referred to her voters as "chahnewales" or people who liked her. Not her "fans" which presumes a certain adulation and devotion and which far less accomplished people were going on about. And her use of the word "niswarth" (selfless) is a pretty good way of evaluating a situation where people who make do with far less and were voting for a contestant to walk away with a fair amount of rupiya.
No comments:
Post a Comment