A Study in Voyeurism

It has been a little over 10 days since the Hindi reality show Bigg Boss started and viewership records are being broken. Its genesis was a Dutch show. In India, it was first launched in Hindi and since then regional language spin- offs have proven equally popular. The format is carefully managed, choosing which of the contestants to highlight to the television audience so that they keep returning to watch it every night, and thus becoming a testament to what ap- peals to human beings when it comes to voyeurism.

 Inevitably, it is the worst behaviour that is most compelling to watch. As a result, inside the house, situations are deliberately created so that people get into fights, or form groups in psychological combat mode against one another. We must not fault the makers of the show. They only recognised the phenomenon and decided to exploit it. The contestants, too, know nice behaviour will take the cameras away from them. Many of them are from the world of entertainment, but, even if the nicest at heart, no one can keep up a performance for weeks on end under a 24-hour microscope. They have to consciously induce a worse version of them- selves. There must be a psychological toll, but the reward is fame and career benefits that come from it.

The viewer thinks himself fair in his opinions about the contestants, but that is a delusion. He is week by week, making judgements of who is good and bad, unaware that it is engineered by carefully chosen clips. He imagines he knows everything, but all he knows is what he is being shown and that is also to cater to his own base side. This is not so different in the outside world either. The nature of politics, for instance, changed with social media. The numbers of those who became politically conscious exploded because politics came home to them on their mobile phones. They formed opinions that earlier they felt there was no need to hold. But those opinions, too, were based on little slices being fed to them depending on algorithms and the entities who could manipulate them.

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