Review: 'Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives' or mundane lives of mediocre people

Come on, we can’t just watch Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives and leave without a comment. Reactions that range from ‘what was that?’ to ‘how can they call themselves Bollywood?’ and ‘I watched it because the cameraman’s nephew studied with my niece’.

Who are these women and what are they saying and why are they saying it to us? Yes, we are aware of the concept – there are foreign reality shows where housewives with plastic faces and stick-thin bodies fight scripted fights over wine and sleep with each other’s men. But their celebrity-hood or lack thereof is not in our general-knowledge jurisdiction. Now that there is a desi copy of a copy of a copy, the glam grams of any Bollywood claimants go into the weighing scales.

Apart from the sexist connotations of being called a housewife – who marries a house? – loud neurotic women going here and there, saying this and that is neither good audio nor visual.

People who watched this show now demand a sequel of their own. This will involve tracking all those who watched this show in real time and were videotaped going to sleep with their mouth open or complaining about how cold their curry is or comparing a protagonist on screen to their mother-in-law. These tapes will then be edited slickly. The shot of a man yelling into his phone with one eye on Neelam’s dull dilemma over joining films – cue suspense music – interspersed with a pan camera movement of someone blowing a raspberry just when the proud papa starts dancing (badly) with his daughter whom nobody knows – cue drum roll – and the final climax shot of a car-chase equivalent, a TV being thrown off a building when a plane lands in Doha – cue utter silence.

Please don’t misunderstand us. We are star-struck, but we are not kuch bhi-struck. A good gentleman had once said kuch kuch hota hai, but please don’t wake us up from deep sleep just because nothing nothing is happening to no one no one. Do not take our respect for nepotism for granted and throw in has-been actors to mix them into a flat, flat cocktail. When we say stars, we mean stars with their twinkle on, okay? Don’t fob us off with an SRK drifting in at the end like he doesn’t know the lines – too little too late. Start with him, stay with him, call it Bollywood Husbands, and we will be back.

Just because we are a captive audience, working from home and picking up quarrels with our dog, does not mean – we repeat, does not mean – we are available as an audience en masse to witness the mundane lives of mediocre people. I mean, we are related to relatives of someone who is soon going to be famous too.

On the plus side, if this show was meant to highlight how happening our own lives are, it works. But if it was meant to make us green with envy, we remain as wheatish as ever. Delete ‘Fabulous’ and delete ‘Bollywood’, re-title this show Lives of Wives, and you have a deal.