‘Bigg Boss’ is a total package: a show of shame, a case study in human behavior, and a testing ground for the character and mental strength of (controversial) celebrities when made to live without facilities. And also, a weekly jukebox of songs from the Salman Khan movies. It is a strange sight. Where else can you see people dancing to lively songs as soon as they wake up? And where else can you see an elitist normalization and trivialization of all the vices that plague society?
There is as much abuse, fighting, backbiting, and misogyny on Twitter as there is on the reality show. So much so that at a time when India is mourning the Hathras gangrape case, an economy in decline and the new coronavirus, the main trends on the microblogging website are ruled by ‘Bigg Boss’ and its current contestants. and earlier.
Sidharth Shukla, the winner of the show’s thirteenth and most successful season, has an army of fans, known as SidHearts, and they strive to use trending hashtags on their behalf almost every day. They function as a support system, ready at all times to defend their idol even when he overdoes his aggression.
Another famous contestant is Shehnaaz Kaur Gill, also a close friend (or so we know) of Sidharth. His fans are called ‘Shehnaazians’, always up in arms against SidHearts. The reason is the ‘SidNaaz’ tag. Twitter users, aged 12-13 and 36-37, battle each other to prove who, between Sidharth and Shehnaaz, “used” the other during the course of the show. Shehnaaz fans call Sidharth by indescribable names, and vice versa, this is when the two stars have always vouched for their unbreakable bond and friendship.
Nobody wins, not even the Sidnazians. And precisely speaking, only Sidharth and Shehnaaz lose. Right after the TV TRP scam came another hoax by the name of ‘Bigg Boss 14’. Reports say that the creators of the voyeuristic show wanted to cash in on the popularity of the last season and asked Shukla to add spice and ‘all the good stuff’ to the otherwise bland cast.
Season 11 runner-up Hina Khan and season 7 winner Gauahar Khan were also invited as what they called ‘seniors’. And what happened was surprising. Gauahar linked up with Sidharth, the same man he shadowed on Twitter during season 13. Sidharth and Hina joked leading to #SidHina.
The hashtag, however, died a tragic death towards the end of its term when a video of Hina casting a shadow over Shuklajee went viral. However, Sidharth did not change at all. He flirted like a pro, screamed at high decibels, and struggled like his S13 self. His presence on Bigg Boss 14 brought the TRPs into the first weeks of the race, and by the same numbers, the channel gave him an unceremonious farewell. Due to more eyeballs.
And more of this interest means more wars on social media. That’s exactly what happened. Several “blue ticks” on Twitter stood up in favor of the Khan duo when Rubina Dilaik, a contestant, screamed “woman power” on television, on a topic not even remotely related to femininity. They again sided with Hina and Gauahar when Bigg Boss declared that Sidharth’s team on one task had lost due to “bahumat” (read: majority).
The truth is that most of the faces on Twitter that speak out for non-abusive and non-aggressive behavior on a show that runs solely on these premises is more of a sham. And the faceless creatures on the Twitterverse who teach celebrities how to behave on national television aren’t holy, either.
The neutral audience for a show like ‘Bigg Boss’ is a myth, and what happens on social media, therefore, is a tug of war between the celebrity fans who participate in the show. There is no moral or ethical validation of any action that occurs on the show or on social media.
It is a show, and the presenter Salman Khan has repeated it a lot, where a person needs to project himself with a certain value. He can be a Sidharth with his logical mind and aggression, or he can be a Shehnaaz with his royal and entertaining streak. It can be a Gauahar with its fighting spirit, or it can be a Vikas Gupta with its strategies. These values come at the cost of suppressing the best part of one’s character: Sidharth lets go of his funny and emotional side quite often and Gauahar his human side in their respective seasons.
The projection of his flaws becomes the talk of the city, and a silly public relations battle ensues on social media. Those who know, say, person A personally or from before side with him and beat up all his opponents. The same goes for person B. The lines of war are drawn in full view, on Twitter and Instagram, through posts and videos. More serious issues like women’s empowerment, feminism, and chauvinism are taken in stride, even when the entire show reeks of competition between all contestants, and not between two genders.
Journalists, with loyalties and alliances, also become part of the detractors. Fans, mostly between the ages of 15 and 40, are swayed and thus reduce the speech of an inconsequential fight to abysmal depths of sometimes embarrassment and sometimes body shame. Age shame also became a tool in the thirteenth season, where Sidharth Shukla was told many times, on the show and on social media, that he was 39 years old.
The tragedy is that the audience falls in love with her. How else can you explain the daily trends that are performed on behalf of these contestants? Their idol battles become their own and rigorous trends happen day and night. Of course, some, in various cases, are bots that participate to increase the social media presence of an unknown face. But more than half are genuine, flesh-and-blood audiences who spend their precious time on trends.
There is also a separate queue of influencers on social media who, through video reviews, try to “influence” the perception of a larger batch. Some of them are former contestants from previous seasons, and needless to say, they have been responsible for more than half of the vices they claim to mention in their reviews.
The last season of ‘Bigg Boss’ allowed its viewers to watch the broadcast live from home. This certainly proved what has been said about the show – it may not have a script, but it is a heavily edited show. Season 14 had so many moments on the livestream, like Sidharth playing, that they deserved to be broadcast on television in the main episode. But nobody would have liked to have fun. Drama sells, that’s what ‘Bigg Boss’ is all about.
No celebrity or contestant, living with unfamiliar faces, deserves to be judged based on 24-hour footage clipped into an hour-long episode. In case of being judged, it must be based on how real they are – that’s the real challenge. Judging, shading, or berating them for any other reason is just toxic positivity (read: shaming and shaming, of all kinds, is just as bad as abusing, maybe even worse).
‘Bigg Boss’ is a non-serious show about all of life’s non-serious problems, a silly mix of PR campaigns, fan wars, and quarantined human behavior (read: no cell phones too), purely created to entertain the audience. It’s time we stopped taking it so seriously.
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