Becky Blab

While I’m on the subject of shows, yesterday I watched some Indian MTV for the first time. We have opted not to have a television in our apartment, so as not to be constantly bombarded by advertisements and silly shooting techniques which make the images flash before you in mere split seconds. Since I was locked out and waiting for the keys to be delivered to me, I spent some time next door with my lovely neighbors.

While the mother was busy in the kitchen, preparing the father’s tiffin to be sent to his office, me and the two sons watched the new MTV show called Splitsvilla. Granted I could not understand a lot of what was said since it was in Hindi, but it’s all the same melodramatic content I’m sure. In typical MTV style, this reality show features a competition among numerous beautiful female contestants, living together and vying for the affections of only two equally attractive guys. As they put it on their site:

Everybody loves a love story! We bet you do to (sic)! Especially, when it’s set in Goa and involves 2 boys and a girl. Oops… we mean 2 boys and 20 girls… Actually, 2 Greek gods and 20 naughty-sexy-bitchy girls!

This formulaic show is nothing new, having been exhausted long ago but constantly revived under different guises. Yet what really hit me was how utterly ‘western’ and ‘modern’ the show was–as if it wasn’t even happening here in India. There I was, sitting in a joint household, with the mother sweating away in the kitchen, and the grandmother looking on at the show with what I can only imagine as being horror at the skimpy attire of the show’s ladies, oops I mean ‘naughty-sexy-bitchy girls’.

On the one hand, that the show writes about the women in such a manner is repulsively retrograde; on the other, it can be seen compassionately as a poor attempt, using trendy lingo, to describe today’s young Indian women. While it comes as no surprise to be seeing such a depiction, it might have been nice to see a bit more credit given to these ‘girls’ than those three adjectives. Indeed, what may make them so ‘naughty’ is the mere fact that they are participants in this show in the first place, going so against the grain of mainstream Indian culture’s expectations for female behaviour. While I would like to see these women as ‘empowered’, sadly it is not so easy to trade one set of shackles for another–to exchange a salwaar kameez for a miniskirt, brush our hands and be done with the whole nasty affair of patriarchy. Using your looks and charm to woo some random guys for a prize is hardly the epitome of feminist emancipation.

To end where I started, in the kitchen, see here: ‘Sexy women have messy kitchens’. I’d like to believe that’s true, having an extremely disorderly kitchen and apartment at the moment, but I don’t want to buy the hype. Sure, I’m all for sexual freedom and scrapping housework, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed, just because a woman is attractive unfortunately does not make her exempt from her duties nor make her doting suitors do it for her!