A show for rejects with ‘talent’

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Kya aap hair ki lice ko fast-fast pakad sakte hai? Kya aap ek taang pe skip karte-karte jhaaru laga sahte hain? Kya aap musical farts maar sakte hain? If yes, then there’s a TV show just for you, and every weird aunty, uncle, bachcha who has painstakingly, over years, honed some rather pointless talent.

Gajab Desh Ki Ajab Kahaniyaan (Imagine) is a show for all the rejects from other talent shows. So, of course, it is hosted by the recently nipped-and-tucked Rakhi Sawant.
In the first episode that I watched, Rakhi Sawant arrived in what looked like the rexine cover of an old sofa — the poor thing seemed to have been ripped off and pasted onto her. She screamed, danced, talked nonsense and finally welcomed to the show the world’s tiniest body builder, Aditya Romeo Dev. Now, the deal with this 22-year-old man is that he is 33-inches-tall, weighs 11 kgs and can lift three-four kilos. The Guinness World Record people have honoured him with a mention.
Apart from the fact that Romeo is small and can lift my dumbbells, the only reason to get someone like him — and to have Rakhi cradle him like a baby, make him walk between her legs, even propose marriage to him — is the most ghatiya kind of exploitation. But then, this channel has always been desperate. You never know with them. They may even get a blind man and make Rakhi Sawant play catch-me-if-you-can with him. Cruel.
The next guest I had the honour of watching, in another episode, was one cretin lady whose presence had been requested on the show because she could, you know, make men go totally lattoo over her. Did you say, huh?
Anyway, this possessor of the Power to Turn Men to Putty, was happily fooling three burly boys into believing she was in love with each one of them. The nincompoops didn’t know that she was triple timing. But Imagine people did, and they decided to unleash her and her deranged babble — “men treat women like bedsheet” — on innocent viewers. Rakhi met all the three boys, talked to them, and then, by the powers vested in the producer of the show, the lady’s secrets came tumbling out. The three boys were mighty miffed and kept charging towards her like crazed bulls. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and recalled that priceless Stephen Fry line: “Sometimes there just isn’t enough vomit in the world.”