Three Girls and a Rahul- I will be watching, will you?

Let me begin by confessing that I am going to watch the Grand Finale of the circus called "Rahul Dulhaniya le Jayega- Swayamvar Season II" (Rahul will take the bride- Season II of choosing your spouse). I am going to watch it for many reasons- I want to know who Rahul will finally select and who he will reject and whether he will actually wed the girl LIVE! Last season Rakhi Sawant did not and that has simply created more curiosity.

But the fact that I am going to watch this show does not mean that it has not provoked me (and my guess is many others along with me) to think what this phenomenon is really about. Clearly inspired by the American shows Bachelor/Bachelorette, the show - Swaymavar- lays to public view the most private and intimate of human pursuits- search for a life partner. You have well educated, smart young men and women willingly risking public humiliation of rejection in the hope of marrying a person they barely know. They woo the "eligible" person, get filmed in intimate moments, knowing that only one of them will make it to the final and the rest will have to live with the tag of being the "reject" for the rest of their lives. So why do these people do it and equally importantly why do we watch them make fools of themselves in a show which we all know is a charade?

The men and women certainly do not do it for the bachelor or the bachelorette up for grabs. Take this season's groom- Rahul Mahajan. Very ordinary looking, and his only claim to fame being that he is the son of a slain politician and someone who has courted controversy after controversy while his father was alive and after and came close to death once in one such escapade. Throughout the show I saw nothing that revealed exceptional intelligence or character. He was clearly guided by the producers to give canned answers and responses at each juncture and in a "grilling" session where he was supposed to talk of his shady past, he simply glossed over the issues ending with a heart wrenching story about his father's funeral. So it is not the lure of a "catch" that is attracting these women.

The answers are perhaps far simpler than we think. Speaking for myself I watch the show because of its slick production value and because as always we love to watch others get embarrassed ( yes that is the reason we like watching people get knocked about in slapstick comedies). Mean spirited as it may sound, we watch to see who will get eliminated and humiliated and not so much to see who will win. And as for why the participants put themselves through this humiliation- can it be anything other than a hunger for their fifteen minutes of fame? All of them are young, good looking and obviously ambitious. This is their quick ticket to public exposure, which they can later parley into some gains depending on how savvy they are.

So at this intersection of unembarrassed public curiosity and unbridled human ambition the media has found a winning formula for a television show even though it flaunts all emotional logic and in the case of the Indian show even makes a mockery of the various wedding ceremonies by having the rituals performed for multiple brides and grooms at the same time. It certainly helps the production house's case that our Indian weddings so willingly lend themselves to glamour, pomp and show and it has to be said NDTV has done a darned good job of milking it all. So best of luck to them and more mindless TV watching to the likes of me. After all they make the show because we watch it!