After watching the first week of Bigg Boss 12, I felt my brain had melted

The problem with having a surfeit of celebrity reality shows is that sooner or later you will run out of celebrities. If you are Karan Johar, you introduce a revolving door policy where the same celebrities appear on each season of your show in different permutations and combinations. Sadly, Endemol doesn’t have as great an impact on the lives of celebrities, so their ability to keep attracting even slightly well-known celebrities seems to be diminishing. Which is why we have the sickly forgettable runts of the entertainment litter in each season nowadays.

This season’s contestants are divided into jodis and singles, with a sub-category of celebrities and commoners. In the list of celebrity contestants, there are television stars including Sasural Simar Ka’s Dipika Kakar, Karanvir Bohra, Srishty Rode and Nehha Pendse, crying cricketer Sreesanth and bhajan singer Anup Jalota with his girlfriend Jasleen Matharu.

The commoners are in pairs and include siblings Somi and Saba Khan, policeman and lawyer Romil Chaudhary and Nirmal Singh, Sourabh Patel and Shivashish Mishra, Deepak Thakur and Urvashi Vani and Kriti Verma and Roshmi Banik. One of these contestants is in the news for claiming he’s a farmer, when he’s actually a casting director – which speaks volumes about Endemol’s research team’s dedication to background checks.

Of the lot, I must say, I’m most impressed by Jasleen Matharu, who “is a trained dancer in Bharatnatyam, Hip-Hop, Salsa and Belly-Dancing”. She also featured in some music videos. Love Day Love Day is Jasleen’s solo debut album as a singer and performer, and the video was directed by her father, Kesar Matharu. And [she] is also “a brown belt in kickboxing and has been practicing it for the past 7 years”. She is also Jalota’s inamorata. Jalota it seems is our answer to Elizabeth Taylor going by the multiple times he has gotten married.

The most annoying of the lot is Sreesanth. He constantly cries on the show and you realise how annoying he must have been for police during investigations. When he isn’t crying and locking himself in the loo, he’s threatening to leave the show. But I think the exit clause of the show makes him change his mind each time. Sreesanth isn’t good at sticking to reality shows going by his last experience in dance reality show Jhalak Dikhla Jaa which he left midway when he disagreed with the show’s judges – Madhuri Dixit, Remo D’Souza and Karan Johar – after they criticised his dancing.

I’m surprised, though, that there are no transgenders, porn stars, cross-dressers, people from the LGBTQI community, sadhus or politicians. No Sofia Hayat, Sunny Leone, Pam Anderson, Sanjay Nirupam? Has even Bigg Boss run through its Little Book Of Trashy Stars? Say it isn’t so. Where is Radhe Maa? At the launch event of the show in Goa, where Salman had forgotten to wear his shirt for some reason, comedian Bharti Singh and her husband Haarsh Limbachiyaa were introduced as a “celebrity couple”. But they are nowhere to be seen.

But onto the show and what transpired over the last few episodes. Brace yourself, this is some spectacular programming.

To make Salman feel at home, there’s a slightly sunken jail in the garden area in which people get locked up occasionally. And much like Salman’s jail stints, even the Bigg Boss contestants barely spend any time in the lockup and look quite relaxed and pleased while there.

But most importantly, while we might be aping the West and choosing the worst of their programmes to run with in India, phir bhi dil hai Hindustani. Thespian Varun Dhawan made an appearance on the show to promote his film Sui Dhaaga, and referred to Salman Khan as a ‘Made in India’ actor, as a dig against Chinese products. Although going by the fact that our largest nationalist symbol, the statue of Sardar Patel is being built by Chinese engineers, we can do without trashing Chinese manufacturing. Dhawan’s episode had him discussing the concept of Sui Dhaaga, and how the film promotes Indian handloom.

Salman took the Sui Dhaaga challenge and I must admit I was impressed to see that he can sew and knit as well as most skilled tailors. To show the great creativity on display by the programming team, Dhawan then asked the jodis and singles to sew pillows. Cry-Me-A-River Sreesanth was the captain of the blue team while Somi Khan was the captain of the orange team, and the two captains had to check the quality of pillowcases stitched by their opposing team. I told you, it’s thrilling.

Then four of the contestants play kabaddi. Something called the Sultani Akhada was discussed with great excitement. The two teams wrestled. It was all too much. I had to take a break and drink a glass of water to deal with the excitement. In between all this, there were important conversations on how one of the girls stinks up the loo. She then started crying and saying everyone stinks up the loo when they expel the contents of their bowels. People were sympathetic. I started weeping, because I could feel my brain melting.

My favourite moment though was when there was a fight over why people are putting dry trash in the wet trashcan, which is yellow in colour because “peela hai toh geela hai” (if it’s yellow, it’s for the wet trash). During this fight, Jalota came and sat down on the futon next to the screaming contestants and calmly started doing riyaaz. Then the camera panned to his girlfriend who was standing next to the screamers and humming a pop song. Truly, jodi rab ne banayi.

But the pièce de résistance of the show was when over the weekend, Dibang from ABP News presented a news bulletin to the contestants on what had transpired during the week, and interrogated them on their antics. This is like watching Anderson Cooper come on as the weekend host of Big Brother or even The Voice.

At least Salman and the contestants of the show are making no pretense of why they are there. The former is there for the publicity and the money, as are the latter. I don’t know what’s motivating journalists like Anjana Om Kashyap (who was in the premiere episode) and Dibang, though. But then again, journalism is more entertainment nowadays. Maybe the next season should be a Bigg Boss special featuring just journalists as contestants. Endemol can send me a cheque if they ever plan on going ahead with this.

Till such time, here’s to another 8 years of Bigg Boss with stranger and more unknown contestants with every passing year.