MasterChef India 4: What's the song and dance all about?

We are a nation that loves to dance and there is absolutely no debating that. At weddings, we don’t shy away from dragging, even manhandling our brigade of relatives on the dance floor or on the road. Our baraats (wedding processions) are a must-watch feast. On the big screen, we do that to our actors, we insist that actors like Sunny Deol shake a leg and then we imitate their act. In short, when it comes to dancing we’re a land of zero-inhibitions and mass-aspirations. We were born to dance and we take the phrase "dance like no one is watching" seriously.  

Talk telly and our dance reality shows have seen anyone from a cricketer to a singer attempt to entertain us. Think S Sreesanth and Sukhvinder Singh. If you’re born to this land, you must know how to shake that booty. The latest case in point being multi-faceted Chetan Bhagat judging the forthcoming season of Nach Baliye. Now of course, this motivational speaker-writer (scriptwriter)-business student knows it all. Again, there is absolutely no debating that. And then on shows like Comedy Nights With Kapil we’ve seen the enthusiastic audience insist that every guest dances with them, irrespective of them being cricketers or badminton players or directors.

Yes, dancing for us is an expression that suggests how far (desperate) we can go to achieve something. And that’s what the recently concluded competitive cooking show MasterChef India 4 (the finale aired last evening) established for us, yet again. For those who missed realising the origin of the show, it is based on the original British MasterChef. (I’d say hold on with those sneering remarks, watch the finale first.)

So, in the last leg of the show, just like any other reality show or otherwise, the team wanted to have a real blast. And voilà, what better than dancing, followed by a singing feat! Singing, by the way is our nation’s second love. And boy, they danced and sang: no amount of ridicule could have stopped them.

The host Raghu Ram wore a silly smile all through the show and was profusely apologetic about not abusing. The final three contestants, ladies whose culinary skills were put to test through a medium of online voting (real tasting and cooking was secondary) took to the stage further confirming that this show was indeed about anything and everything but cooking! From "Chittiyaan Kalaiyaan" to "Gujariya", the "chefs" took complete control. I was beginning to think that the worst was over when last season’s winner of MasterChef India Ripu Daman Handa took over the stage with his fiancé: to show his mettle. They danced with a couple whom (I think) they had participated with on a dance reality show.

This was not going to end well, I knew by now. The judges expressed their delight on witnessing this "other" side of the contestants and they declared that the show must go on. So, Sanjeev Kapoor (riding high and mighty on his Khana Khazana fame), Vikas Khanna (oh, the good-cute-looking one, you know him) and Ranveer Brar (sorry, I know nothing of him, his PR team needs to pull up their socks) sang and swayed to a self-composed MasterChef anthem. The contestants were touched be this tribute, I too was teary-eyed but I wanted to wait to know who’d won this joke of a show called: MasterChef India, so I did not switch channels! The fact that the judges were playing active supporters to this concept is another story, all together.

Next, Kangana Ranaut and R Madhavan came to promote a film and served paani puri to Ranveer Brar; the latter by now had convinced me that he was living under an assumption that by the virtue of his name he was an actor/rapper/dancer too. No one was doing what they were trained/known to do! Chefs were dancing, actors were cooking and Raghu was not swearing. Chetan, Preity Zinta and a choreographer (even if I were to mention his name, it will be insignificant) walked in to tell us they would be judging a dance reality show. I was glad they clarified it would be called Nach Baliye else I would have assumed they were talking of the next season of MasterChef. So yes, the show ended with a Abu-Dhabi girl winning the title and declaring that the show helped her realise that India was truly her home!

I was so emotional and on an entertainment high by the end of it that I decided to calm my nerves by watching another cookery show. This one was called Farah Ki Dawat, where a choreographer-turned director-turned reality show judge-turned "chef" was teaching a celebrity couple Ritesh Deshmukh and Genelia D'Souza how to close the lid of a pressure cooker.

Since I had brought this on myself and couldn’t blame anyone for what I had witnessed in the last few minutes, I treated myself to an episode of So You Think You Can Dance (pun intended).

As for now, I am at peace, till of course there is an announcement made that a dancing-singing school has been set up by MasterChef contestants!