Munawar Faruqui, Bigg Boss and what makes reality TV so relevant

Munawar Faruqui, whose stand-up comedy career hit a wall before he patched a tactical-if-bizarre reboot on the reality TV circuit, has endured the prickly depths of ignominy. (Screen grabs from video posted on Instagram by munawar.faruqui)

Swarms of people crowd a vehicle. Hysteria, chaos and a sense of collective euphoria tapes itself to a radiating core. This street has never looked as vast and accommodating as it does today. The winning contender emerges through the roof of a car, holding aloft the that symbolises an improbable win. A victory against odds, against expectation and precedent. He sways right, then left, as the crowd joins him their phones clicking at the speed of a mind overawed by the spectacle. No, these are not the scenes of Rohan Bopanna being received at the airport after achieving the mind-boggling feat of winning a grand slam aged 43. These are instead, scenes Munawar Faruqui’s reintroduction to public life, post his victory at Season 17 of Bigg Boss.

Much has been made of the now-viral footage of Faruqui’s return to streets of Dongri, that he has called home for some time. Does winning a reality TV show – Faruqui’s second such victory incidentally – really merit such delirious fanfare? Reality TV, which many consider it cultured to disassociate from, clearly has a way of attaching to the masses. Indeed, Endemol’s Bigg Boss brand is a descendant of the endlessly and globally popular Big Brother franchise, which continues to enthral, engage and attract 25 years after it first hit screens as a lean, experimental series in the Netherlands of 1999.

Ever since it was first developed as survival-surveillance game show, Big Brother (title borrowed from George Orwell’s 1984) has been adapted and updated in countless geographies. From countries as far as Sierra Leone to as stringent as Iraq, the fly-on-the-wall format has been adapted to countless cultures. Unsurprisingly, the format’s onerous design, it’s very intent to test human restraint and resolve has landed the show into trouble. From being sued by Orwell’s estate to being litigated for sexual violence, rape and abuse, the show has practically lived on the very edge it likes to operate from as an observational document of humanity under duress.

In India, the only country with seven different versions (different languages), there is clearly an audience, a case for the cautiously pushed envelope and just about enough causative sparkle to suggest a cultural revolution that never quite is. Bigg Boss employs the surveillance methods of an Orwellian dystopia, the realism of sudden deprivation and the social judgement, that mirrors just about any neighbourhood or joint family in the country. It’s basically our reality, which makes you wonder why so many people watch. Moreover, why would you want to be a part of it?

In an interview to news.com.au, psychologist Sarah Angel (adviser on the show’s Australia version) spills some curious beans. “I think ultimately people have a little bit of voyeurism in them. It's human nature to be interested in what people do on a day-to-day basis. Audiences get attached to the people, they get to know them, they see them develop through the show, they feel like they're involved,” she says about this bizarre but popular ritual of people watching, people sitting around and bickering.

The contestants in the Big Boss household are, much like any reality show, carefully chosen. “What we're looking for basically is real people but also people that have intelligence, depth of character, and substance. I guess it's looking for those interesting people and not people who are extremes that other people can't relate to,” Angel says. ‘Relatability’, is possibly the keyword here. Faruqui represents a proportional majority, attending to life as a sort of underdog exercise. Compared to the laurels, a sportsperson might earn on some distant, international turf, a neighbourly comedian’s resurgence from the lows of humiliation and criticism, feels like a socialistic tribute. It’s precisely the language in which the masses dream. Of which the victorious comedian, feels like an unlikely, but welcome edification.

Faruqui, whose stand-up comedy career hit a brick wall before a tactical if bizarre reboot on the reality TV circuit, has endured the prickly depths of ignominy. His attempts to re-enter public life have ranged from bizarre to dire. It also indicates the solitary trunk that careers birthed as branches of publicly scrutinised lives are dependent on. On some level, this is the salvation of someone who has had to suffer a fair bit. On another, it restricts Faruqui’s identity to the crystallization cycle of reality TV - India has seen the rise of many a reality TV celeb; including Orry and Shehnaaz Gill on Bigg Boss. You can really only be the accident or the survivor on his way to meet another. Doomed to float, so to speak. It won’t be long before Faruqui is back on another reality show.

Munawar Faruqui (Image via X)

The competition, the award is merely an addendum to the actual prize, which is instantaneous fame and the chunky, imprecise process of getting there. In the BBC podcast Unreal:A Critical History of Reality TV, Pandora Sykes and Sirin Kale, suggest that the elemental basis for Big Brother has always been ‘authenticity’. The fact that it impresses upon audiences, a sense of someone’s true self. The surveillance, the gruelling challenges, the compressed sexual politics are all engineered to emit humanity in all its glorious contradictions and conflicts. Inauthenticity, however agreeable, might in fact be the kiss of death. Of course, contestants cook controversies but the script, like any good story, reviewed by a voting audience.

In the show’s reality, however, there are adjudged winners and losers. Though Big Brother’s credibility and popularity has declined in most countries, in India it continues to hold the nation’s imagination. Whether that says something about the thickly layered red tape that our social exteriors are forced to wear or about the general pleasures of ‘confront-ainment’ is anyone’s guess. For now, Faruqui has been declared the victor of some tangibles (Rs 50 lakh pre-tax) and a generic trophy. What he has won, actually, is maybe for everyone to witness, absorb and deconstruct.