Bigg Boss is back and so is Salman: What the hell

It happens every year and strikes me with the full force of an unpleasant surprise every time. Bigg Boss is back. No sooner had you gotten over its lingering rotten aftertaste than you are told that a new season is round the corner. You can hope to ignore it, but thanks to the humongous marketing budget that Colors assigns the show, there is little chance that there would be any media platform that will not talk about the show over the coming months.

The relentless media cycle will now begin in earnest. Salman Khan is back, even though he had threatened to go off air in each of the past instalments that he has hosted. One time, he was sick of the foul language, another time he thought there was too much drama. (Uhm, too much drama? Salman please, you are Bollywood!)

At any rate, he is back, and so is the speculation over who will enter the house in the upcoming season. As always, anyone with even a hint of a controversy in the past few months will be invited. So we hear Radhe Maa is a contender, as is Shweta Basu. Sana Saeed is in as is VJ Bani. And then, there is Rahul Yadav - yes, he who has nothing to do with entertainment - who wrote on his Facebook page that he cannot decide if he should be a part of it.

I don't think he should. Didn't he promise us that he will come up with something spectacular to beat Housing.com which unceremoniously ejected him a while back? He has the chops to do it, so why appear on a trashy programme where he would definitely not meet anyone of his intellectual calibre and will be made to do stupid things so that he ends up picking fights with the others?

Also read: Who needs Bigg Boss when your TV is one giant reality show

Oh right! Maybe that's the reason they thought of Rahul, since he seems to do okay in that department. But in the popular imagination, he is a rock star, fighting with the powers to get his way, and consistently trying to prove that he has the answers to India's tech backwardness. Please don't fritter that away by coming on a no-show, Rahul. Especially since you will keep losing your cool inside, which will be great for the channel but not so much for your public image.

Then again, maybe the money is good, and Rahul can certainly use some after he distributed his stake in Housing.com among the employees. Which is perhaps why all the others are getting on the bandwagon too. If you are already facing some public heat, goes the thinking, you might as well make some cash out of it!

Radhe Maa? Can she even come, given that some of the cases against her will be heard soon and she might be sent to custody? For Colors she will be a bonanza, if she makes it. With her doll-like antics before her devotees and the familiar rags-to-riches story, the show is sure to revolve around her, at least in the beginning, when people are polite and not yet going for one another's jugular. But she too must ask herself if she wants the additional penetrating gaze than what she has already been subjected to.

I will come to the other aspects later but entering the Bigg Boss house isn't even a smart move. Some contestants in the past have appeared on the show in order that they may present their real selves, and so disabuse viewers of shameful notions emerging from their public personas. But more often than not, the private person turns out to be a close doppelganger of the public image. Rahul Mahajan made a consistent fool of himself on the show, and only reinforced the image people had of his since his father's demise. Akashdeep Saigal, who played the ill-tempered son of Tulsi on Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, indulged in more than one act of verbal violence inside the house.

Also read: Who is Bigg Boss to decide if a man can't abuse a woman?

Besides, the drama inside the house gets so intense that even otherwise sane people cannot help losing their cool. Since a lot of them know one another from moving in the same circles in Mumbai, real life stories are brought up, to everyone's peril. When Shweta Tiwari got on the wrong side of Dolly Bindra in one season, the latter made bruising allegations against Tiwari in her characteristic, drum-beating fashion. It blew up badly, raising blood pressures inside the house and outside.

To be sure, on the rarest occasion some good emerges from the show. Upen Patel and Karishma Tanna fell in love inside the house, and we know they did because they continue to be together. But mostly, the show does not offer anything even remotely heart-warming. Its USP to the viewer is the vicarious thrill at seeing others fight and jostle for silly supremacy. If reports that Shweta Basu will enter the house are true, I already feel bad for the actor. She faced a sex scandal in which the media issued multiple character certificates on her without context or without shaming any of her clients. I am certain that this will come up inside the house in a way that demeans her further.

Dear people whom Colors has gotten in touch with, save your souls and run as fast as possible from that alluring contract! There is money enough to be made with other avenues.