Emotional Atyachar

Oscar Wilde's "I can resist anything but temptation" has always been my all-time favourite quote. But I had never guessed that someone would, one day, base a reality show on this. I am talking about this s(h)o(w) - called Emotional Atyachar.

Every time I am in Brigade road with my wife, even though she rarely gives any attention to the myriad of handsome hunks passing by, I on countless occasions, have been found staring at every second girl that collides with my line of vision. It is this basic fallacy of the male nature that is being exploited to the hilt in Emotional Atyachar. I would understand and maybe even sympathise with the show had they tried to investigate the real "extra - affair" affairs that are going on. But they are not doing that. What the makers of this show do is send an outrageously seductive temptress (most of them being models), skimpily clad, and bearing an omnipresent expression of "you are the man I have been waiting for all my life" to this antagonist (on whom they are running a so-called loyalty test). And then they expect this person to do nothing. Even a simple hi-hello on his part is recognised as infidelity. Now come on! I have spent the last 28 years of my life on this planet with men of all sorts: from absolute sex maniacs to people who have spent entire nights reading the autobiography of Swami Vivekananda while a porn film was unfolding in its full glory in the adjacent hostel room. How far a person actually goes when confronted with a situation like this (like the one they create in this show) varies from individual to individual, but one thing that I am very sure of is that no sane mortal male with normal levels of testosterone in his system would say "Hey bitch, go away!...I am a committed man and I love my girlfriend/wife very much....O Lord, pardon me, for I have sinned even my looking at this Eve". No Man would do that and the inability of this person to do this makes him guilty.

The show has all the ingredients to make it click. Love, Sex, Dhokha: it has it all. But one really needs to question the rationale behind manipulating imperfections in the human nature for the sake of better TRPs. You entice, allure, provoke someone to commit a mistake and the moment he takes the bait, you pounce upon him with a barrage of hidden cameras, microphones and all kinds of 007 styled surveillance gizmos. And there he is, in front of the whole world, looking like an absolute asshole (very much like the MTV Bakras, only that things are way serious out here). What's more unnerving is the fact that, when in one of the episodes, the person under scrutiny refused to go to bed with one of these models, his wife and the anchor of the show (who were watching the proceedings live through a spy cam) seemed to be really crestfallen. They were expecting him to take the plunge, so that they could make him undergo the oft seen ordeal of getting abused, humiliated, and in some cases, even slapped in public.

I am in no way trying to defend the actions of these people in question. If someone is cheating on his partner, there is no way I, or he, or anyone else can justify that action. It's wrong and no amount of condemnation is enough. But there is a difference between reporting a story, and creating one. I can recollect a chapter in our science class in school: 'Stimuli and Reaction'. It said that there can be a reaction only when there is a stimulus (something that incites to action). If this show were to show us the reactions, then nothing like it. But what the makers of this show are doing is that they are providing the Stimuli, with the foreknowledge that the reactions are all but logical outcomes. Rest aside, one thing that they have got spot-on is the naming of the show. It really is an atyachar, not (as they would like us to believe) on the damsels in distress, who come seeking for "small-screen intervention" to ratify their suspicions, but on the unsuspecting victims who are caught in this vicious game of seduction and shame.