Reality Bites: Zara Nach Ke Dikha

In this age of reality television, with so many shows on air it appears almost unrealistic that they still survive;from "Big Boss" to "Bathroom singer", each one faces immense competition to be more entertaining, more fun, more dramatic and more hatke than the rest of the crowd, giving rise to hypes, controversies, drama and what not, along with a quantum loss in sensitivity and sensibility. One among many in the dancing segment was StarOne's Zara Nach Ke Dikha! that had its Grand Finale last night. The concept of the show was an age old battle of the sexes with a TV star studded team of seven and a half boys versus seven and a half girls, judged by Malaika Arora and Chunky Pandey (remember him?). I saw two or three episodes in the preceding weeks, and they were just fine, with a few good dance performances. To its credit the show was mostly entertaining, always a passe, and the unique point betting system kinda made it fun. That essentially meant that every team put a certain number of points from its kitty as a bet before each round and whoever won the round as per the judges got that many points while the loser lost that many from their tally. With that in place, an additional judge (Saroj Khan) and the Girls and Boys teams nicely pitted at a mere one cumulative point difference, the Grand Finale yesterday seemed interesting enough to watch, and for the next four hours featured decent performances by the participants as well as guest performances by the host and Malaika herself.

The drama element was always high, without doubt. In the first round, the boys bet 300 points of their 870 odd and lost in a close but fair judgement, at least IMO., and in the second again they bet 161 and lost in what was truly a spectacular performance of shadow dance by the girls team. The girls chose to play safe all along, betting (and winning too) smaller totals. The third was a couples round in which the boys clearly had an upper edge over the girls and managed to win back 300 points again, while the girls lost 75. But it was the fourth that was the clincher. It was a Face-off round with a medley performed by one dancer from each team one after the other and mostly simultaneously, and was one of the best dance performances of the show, by both teams. It is hard to choose who was better than the other, and to be honest I enjoyed Bakhtiyar's energy as much as the intricacy and variety of Ashita Singh's steps, but as it turned out, the judges chose to award it to the Girls. They claimed it was close and they probably examined the technicalities better than we did, but it was at least hard to say that one of them had done a bad job. However, the Boys team felt the decision wasn't fair and chose to walkout in frustration, although they were back in some time. That was where things turned ugly. Probably the quality of judgement wasn't upto the mark, and since when is Chunky Pandey (drooling on women) a judge anyway. I did not see all of the series, but I gather that girls won more frequently than guys and there were couple of brilliant people on both sides. Still, even if the boys thought they were short-changed, what they did next in the final round was a complete shocker. As it turned out later, they had lost 250 points in their penultimate round and hence had no chance of winning after that, so they claimed they had lost all motivation because of flawed judging standards and came out lip-syncing on the stage their final performance instead of dancing. What followed was judges expressing outrage, Chunky Pandey wanting a sex change operation and the Girls winning, among other things. Other details here.

Now the point is, I understand if the boys feel unhappy and frustrated, but what they did was in really bad taste. Their gestures, the way each of them bowed in front of the girls teams' desk during that final performance and the manner in which they behaved on national television was plain humiliating and immature. It was unfair on the girls team who put up the hardwork to put a decent show in their turn in that round, and just totally against sportsmanship. There ought to be a more decent way of complaining, or protesting ,but this looked too much like a spoilt kid's act who cannot handle failure. Or maybe just another case of bruised male ego. To express angst against the judges because they thought they should have won when they didn't is one thing, but they went to the extent of disrespecting the opposition by their behavior which was entirely uncalled for. They were the ones who decided to bet so high, and once their risks backfired, they were always going to be on the backfoot. To their bad luck, the girls did a more than decent job consistently, but even if they had lost I do not think that Delnaaz and her girls would have chosen to act so immature and frivolous on TV, rather than just being graceful losers.

Albeit in our times, nothing is increasingly shocking, (even bomb blasts are fast losing newsworthiness) sometimes the new lows of Indian television and celebrity behavior in public manage to shock nevertheless. Full credit.