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.