Kartikey Sehgal

Update, Sep 3: [Link now available on Google Video. Adults Only. Scroll the volume tab to the minimum level]

Shows like Dadagiri make me wonder why nudity is banned in Indian cinema halls.

The image of a naked woman clasping a naked man under a satin sheet of a colour opposite to that of the bodies is less likely to make you violent than the image of a television crew member asking a contestant to get his sister so that he can rape her.

The host of this show is a skimpily clad girl with a whip in her hand who fights with one of the contestants and they talk in obscenities. The girl slaps the contestant and he slaps her back. This irks ‘the man’, the archetype of the modern muscular youth, whose latent sexuality is awakened by the slaps and who decides to express his self in generous physical and verbal abuses.

He attacks the contestant and calls for his sister. He makes references to the contestant’s private parts. Unsatisfied, he asks for the contestant’s mother to quench his self.

A few slaps and kicks later, the seemingly scared contestant asks the ‘man’ (probably the co-host of the show), “How can she hit me. How can she slap me?”

The ha..ha…harassed girl, meanwhile, stands holding the whip and gets some reassurance/sympathy from the television crew (all men), who then proceed to the scene of action; they must savour the moment and partake in the delight of violence; their suppressed sexual feelings find favour in the off-beat of kicks and screams.

The show, aired on a not so popular youth channel, aims to please the confused kids in small towns-fighting the advent of liberalism with the mores of forced traditions- by giving them a model for modern city existence.

News Channels (the author saw Aaj Tak) sell this model to village children and give the city gentry a topic to loathe; children are repeatedly subjected to scenes of violence and abuse.

Dadagiri is mixing sex with modernity; modern girls and boys wear branded clothes and abuse openly. It is picking out the tendencies of small town youth-who fight daggers over women-and presenting the same to them, ensuring a sustained viewership. The host in short pants and tank tops can not carry the grace of her clothes. The ‘man’ repeats the abuses that fathers hurl at women openly and women hurl at men secretly.

Even as a staged product, the slap-abuse incident speaks of the assumed intelligence of the masses. It should be probed by the police as an episode of abuse.

The set of such programs could be converted into sex education classrooms.

[Link to the incident was available till yesterday. It had been posted by the channel on YouTube. They probably fear police action and want to kill the issue immediately. ]