The winning edge

It was Sunday evening. I was recovering from the aftershock of a migraine serious enough for me to wonder whether my head was still attached to the rest of me. But after two days of not being able to focus while watching television or reading or even looking into the refrigerator to see what could be done for dinner, I was fed up and needed entertainment. So I cautiously and very slowly, gently, skimmingly scanned the many newspapers we get, read the comic strips and the horoscopes and then needed more to do. The television was on and I had peeked carefully at it every now and then, wanting to see what was going on where, but afraid that the white flashes and blinding waves of nausea would come back to rock my as-yet-rather-unstable world. And then it suddenly cleared – my head, that is – and though it was still a trifle painful and more cloudy than I really liked, I could look at the small screen and its flickers without feeling shooting sparks of fire and brimstone clashing into my brain cell.

But there was fire on the box as well, a kind of fire that had burned its way through much of the entertainment world and its fans. On his over-hyped talk show, host Karan Johar was speaking to ‘item girl’ Rakhi Sawant. She was introduced with typical fanfare, but with a patronising malice that was her lot when anyone on the show spoke of her, which was almost every guest that had been featured. And she walked in with her back straight, her head high and her air-kisses positioned with perfect poise. As she sat – rather nervously on the edge of her seat, perhaps to keep her sari from creasing on the wrong fold – you could see the work that had gone into making her what she was at that moment: carefully coiffed, carefully made up, carefully dressed and carefully presented.

Then she started speaking and the careful mask split wide open. Behind it was a little girl, naïve, gullible, innocent, with an almost too-good-to-be-true air about it all. She was grateful, she kept saying, to be invited on the show, thanking Karan the whole time for the love and respect that he was giving her. She got that same love and respect from people when she did the Big Boss television reality series, she told him, and would always appreciate than and be for ever indebted for that attention that changed her image from a “cheap item girl” to a serious, talented, involved actress.

But is that how she was perceived? Somehow, after watching episodes of the Karan Johar show where guests and host alike pilloried Rakhi and made her the butt of their sarcastic ridicule, I don’t think so. They had done the same to Mallika Sherawat, who had been invited on the programme with director Sanjay Leela Bhansali and was her most polite and polished self, a product rather than a person. Rakhi, on the other hand, seemed to be just herself, Rakhi Sawant, a girl from what was possibly the wrong side of town trying hard to make good.

And, as that half hour that I watched before my head protested progressed, she certainly did make good. You could see Karan change his mind and get less patronising and more real, more apologetic about having been nasty about her. And you could see her being truly involved, genuinely believing in what she said, tears and laughter and all, with no pretenses and no artifice. In that, she was utterly charming, completely likeable, totally fabulous, a winner. She may have an image that no parent really wants for his or her child, but under the tarty costumes and lewd movements seems to be the soul of a child who craves affection, a girl who is just whatever she says she is. In that, Rakhi Sawant is, for me and for a lot of people who have wondered about her, a lot more worthy of respect and love than the politically correct, milk-and-water, politically correct diplo-bores that populate the entertainment world.

And I think Karan Johar and his ilk found out about that, when they least expected it.