Reality bites... and then chews you up

Reality never had it so good for itself before. But, before we start on our rant, a moment's silence for Shinjini, a schoolgirl paralysed by maybe too much of it.

Every other TV channel has decided that an infusion of life is what every middle-class living room needs. And religiously, reality in its different avatars, in the form of diamond-decked starlets and pan-chewing babus, has invaded our entertainment needs.

Gone are the days when entertainment was escape from reality. That is too shallow for us now. Now it is escape to reality, it seems. Even if reality means a production assistant waves away "intruders on the action." Even if reality means prying into the innards of a simple, functional being. The camera, it seems, is everywhere. And, reality is what is captured on it.

The trouble is that this is not just the latest fad that TV audiences are taking to. The game shows of a decade or two ago and the Saas-bahu soaps that are still popular, were clearly about something "outside," about people resembling us but somehow different. People wanted to be in on all that, but you were not in unless you were in the show itself.

Now we all are the show. Life is no longer sanitised by people wielding the megaphone. There is just the word 'Start' or whatever is the word that is in the beginning, and life just unfolds. We are brought ourselves and our neighbours, and our friends and our enemies all on a few square inches of the latest technology. Welcome to the Truman Show. Welcome to yourself.

The camera, in its long history has finally performed the impossible. Earlier there were allegations that it was opaque on the shooter's side - that things were left out. Now it has been silvered on the lens side, and it reflects what lies behind. Allegations that too much has been left on the scene.. well we were never asked to speak or forever be silent.

For all that TRPs and other intricate number-mongering yields, it is a simple fact, universally acknowledged, that a single reality TV show with simplistic idea or none, is simply in search of a prime spot top be vacated by other silly items like news and stuff.

We have our 24-hour news channels now - who watches them anyway but dull, old people. We have our multiplexes and for those who have no time to go there, we have our local pirate of the DVD ocean. We have our parks and beaches and centres of culture which we can get away to when we can arrange for the six-pack. What we need from TV right now is reality; we need life. And if it is live so much the better.

Unvarnished, unedited, untouched by the editorial scissors that snips out what the human condition expresses from its inmost being. Tears, smiles, shouts of joy and anger, emotions that each of us have felt, and will feel all the more now that we have seen them on TV, shown by people like us.

In the age of reason that we were supposed to be living in, less was supposed to be more. In the age of reality TV that we are living in more is less.