Big Brother finally has an audience

For the longest time I skilfully avoided any “real” contact with Big Brother while secretly disapproving of the intellectual hollowness and the social ineptitude of the millions of people glued to this rubbish TV show. I falsely believed that our own lives must certainly contain the requisite modicum of hope, despair, joy, anger, frustration, delirium and the many other emotions that collectively make up for a real existence. But fads are fads and everyone was raving about Reality TV at the cusp of the 21st century. Big Brother caught the wave at the right time and country after country succumbed to its senseless lure.

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

For those of you who have dodged the world headlines for the past three days let me give a one minute recap. Shilpa Sethi, a B Grade Bollywood Actress, decided to join the communal house in UK’s production of Big Brother. That she might be the first Indian, if not the first non-Brit to appear on the show in UK is quite beside the point. 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 remained 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 from the views of the program 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 to 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 about Indian PR or Indian sensitivity? Or is it a cunning plan by Channel 4 to doctor the reality to boost its ratings.

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 community - 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 real people trying to live a real 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 will be gay, some spoilt, some sober, some creative artists and some simply wankers. Without this diversity life would be boring. What is said in the House should remain in the House. Unpopular housemates will be voted out by the more sensible ones – or so I hope.

What is truly disturbing about the reality of our society is not that an inordinate amount bandwidth is being wasted on the future of two housemates; Shilpa and Jade but that on January 18, no one is quite lamenting the ten precious lives lost to the 70 mph wind storms in this country.