Rakhi Bandhan

When people hear the name Rakhi Sawant, they associate a certain degree of quality and integrity with it. These are the same folks who hear music when you scratch a plate with a fork and who stand and click photographs when they witness a terrible automobile accident. Now, it's not a closely-guarded secret that Rakhi Sawant, like many celebrities whose faces are splattered across our screens, is not a traditional star but someone you can categorise as a shock-star.

Shock-stars do and say things that jolt the average complacent viewer so much that witnessing their antics on TV becomes a form of guilty pleasure that you can't resist. And a 'reality show' is the golden ticket that gives a thick-skinned ambitious individual the opportunity to become rich and famous in very little time. The late Jade Goody is a name that comes to mind when you think of international shock-stars. However, desi shock-star Rakhi Sawant has done one better.

She is now part of a show called 'Pati Patni aur Woh' where five 'celebrity couples' will embark on a challenging and learning experience while we, the viewers, get to see the goof-ups and predicaments they get into trying to take care of the particular baby allotted to them. Sure, the producers of the show would be expecting young parents, especially mothers, to empathise with and maybe even feel properly represented by these struggling-in-more-than-one-way celebrities. The show is apparently intended to capture all the stages of parenthood, from being pregnant to raising teenagers. I might be getting it wrong as a guy, but i'm pretty sure wearing an 'empathy belly' and walking around for a week doesn't quite replicate the experience of pregnancy.

And since the show aspires to bring in all facets of pregnancy to the forefront, perhaps the producers of the show should have devised some ingenious method to duplicate labour pains too. A friend who is a recent mother once, reluctantly, agreed to let the newly appointed nanny carry her baby girl for a while. Minutes later, she almost had her heart sliced when she saw her baby slip out and fall from the nanny's grip. Fortunately, the baby was fine, but it makes one wonder about the parents who let their babies turn into props on such reality shows and even advertisements. I once watched a segment on television where it was shown that chimpanzees are so protective of their babies that they wouldn't even let a tiny bird near them. And to think, Charles Darwin said we evolved.