Putting the Idiot in 'Idiot Box'.

Last month something very strange happened to me. Something that I wasn’t expecting and least of all prepared for. No, I am not talking about puberty. Last month, I got a chance to be on TV.

I managed to scramble myself onto the little box of beaming images by doing a show for MTV. The show for the assured majority who haven’t seen it was called, “MyCam”. It was a show where I spoke about my life and the things that I do. To put it another way it was an excuse for me to be my normal self-centered self except this time I had a larger audience who couldn’t punch me in the face to make me shut up.

This sudden appearance of mine on national television had a profound impact on my life. For starters, I found that a lot of people who had up until then considered me fractionally more fascinating than a sea anemone, now wanted to speak to me. People I hadn’t spoken to in years were now eager to ‘reconnect’. Old friends seemed to come crawling out from under their rocks and stones and were enquiring guiltily about what I was doing. Relatives, who I didn’t know existed called and asked irritating questions like, “Can you recognise who’s calling? You’ve met me when you were very young. Don’t you remember your chacha’s mother’s third cousin? Anyway, you really have grown...” The fact that I was on television made them see me in new light and it made for some tremendously awkward conversations.

One of the classic phrases that you get exposed to a lot when your bloated face and high pitched voice find their way on television is, “Hey! I saw you on TV!”  It’s a phrase for which there is no appropriate answer. They’re not praising you, so you can’t thank them. It’s not an enquiry to which you could answer something simple like, “Am fine.” And it’s definitely not a shared sentiment so you can’t reply with the standard comeback you keep for things like festive greetings.

Person: Hey! I saw you on TV!

You: Same to you!

Person: uh...

I’ve realised that the only way to respond to such a statement is by smiling stupidly and saying, “I can’t believe you survived the horror.”

We seem to have a haloed fascination for people who make an appearance on TV. Even if the person is doing something ridiculous while ‘on air’, like, counting the number of grains there are in a sack of rice, we still consider it a feat worthy of respect. I don’t see why such intrigue is not hoisted onto people who do other, more exciting things in life. For example you’ll never see people saying, “Hey! I saw you save a puppy’s life while simultaneously balancing three china vases on your nose AND riding a horse.”, just because it isn’t on TV.

But overall being on TV was a fun experience. It was my 15 minutes of fame. The minor taste of celebrity was intoxicating for as long as it lasted and I was eternally grateful that my television debut didn’t happen, as I had long feared it would, on India TV. Or worse still, as a contestant on Bigg Boss.