Bigg Boss is about a bunch of losers (that's why I love the show)
In about a week or two from now, another season of Bigg Boss will come to an end. And I must confess that I belong to that breed of lesser mortals who follow the show.
Yes, I love watching the contestants backbiting, backstabbing, backtracking, backwhatever-ing on the show. I love it when masks come falling off and how it takes just a slight provocation to demolish the fake and forced civility you see contestants demonstrating in the first episode.
But is it just that, which makes this show interesting to watch? How long can one watch a bunch of losers brush their teeth before the mirrors every morning, as they bitch about some inmate or the other? Can a show that is vaguely based on the theme of George Orwell's masterpiece 1984 be completely inane, as it is often accused of?
I see an uncanny analogy between the way the Bigg Boss house works and the way religion works.
Let's start with Bigg Boss himself. When you enter the house, you're given to understand that it's Bigg Boss who runs the show, literally, in this house. His word becomes the law of the land, and has to be abided blindly; questioning his rules, or transgressing them, can attract the wrath of the Bigg Boss, following which you could be "punished".
Has anyone, let alone the inmates, seen the mythical Bigg Boss? NO!
We can only hear him. We can only access him through language (a la the holy books); and the communication is always one-way. He only instructs or reprimands. Except for a few instances, wherein requests (read prayers) can be made to this mythic figure, and he may or may not choose to deign to respond.
Factually, this mythical personality, who can see and control every activity of the house, isn't actually a real entity. He is just a voice. A voice that is simply acting as a carrier of the thoughts of a whole team working backstage.
So, essentially, Bigg Boss doesn't really have anything to say of his own. He is simply voicing the thoughts of the people who want the house to function in a certain manner. Therefore the one lie that reverberates through the house daily is, "Bigg Boss chahte hain..."
The Bigg Boss house is also a microcosm of the world we live in. A diverse group of people can live in harmony if all their needs are taken care of, but that's no fun, is it? So now they are put in testing situations which are called "tasks". Some of these tasks push the inmates to the wall, sometimes quite literally, and then their reflexes, called "content", are splashed across TV screens.
Sitting in the comfort of your living rooms with your food-loaded plates in your hands, you naively judge them, blame them, even curse them, without apportioning any share of blame to the almighty Bigg Boss, who purposefully makes the inmates compete for resources.
The tasks trigger a power struggle (to become the Captain) and a struggle for existence (immunity from elimination). And a struggle is bound to throw up its share of victims and villains. We all remember Gautam's outburst and the entire house ganging up against him subsequently, don't we?
Then there are instances when the fate of the all the members of the house is put in the hands of a randomly chosen few. The survival of the masses is put at the mercy of the handful of people like the monarchs in the old days and the parliamentarians in present. Remember the double-trouble room?
The inmates come from different walks of life and are forced to forge bonds in order to survive. They can love each other or hate each other, but cannot escape each other so long as they are in the house.
When an inmate leaves the house, (many of) the other inmates mourn his/her departure, despite knowing that this stay was bound to be temporary and that the said person is only leaving the house, not the world.
They bid adieus with the hope of meeting in the world that's out there, a distant world, a world where they won't have to compete with this fellow for resources - an afterlife.
To a person who's watching the whole drama unfold from the outside, the trials of the inmates seem rather trivial, even ridiculous; but for the inmates it's their immediate reality. They can never judge or analyse the conditions the way we do from outside.
Only when you step out of the system, you can gain the objectivity required to realise that the suffering and struggle, while it is real, is also neither fully of your own making (as karma theory would have you believe), nor of a mythical supernatural being.