‘How can she slap?’ (updated)
Indian reality show Dadagiri, which combines hazing with Fear Factor, recently went Geraldo. Designated bitch Esha slapped contestant Ravi Bhatia, and the guy slapped her back. Is this real or just a publicity stunt? Then the poor fellow gets his ass kicked, because he’s of lower socioeconomic status, India’s litigation system doesn’t really work, and, well, he slapped a woman.
NSFW if your coworkers can cuss in Hindi or Punjabi.
Update: The incident is real and apparently happened four months ago (thanks, Aparita):
“We were all given our parts where 70 per cent was to be said as is and 30 per cent would be improvisations,” says Ravi. “There was this girl called Isha opposite me who was supposed to abuse me and I was to retaliate, but calmly. After a while when it came to improvisations, I presume she was out of words and came and slapped me hard. I was shocked and in the heat of the moment, I slapped her back…
“Just because they have power, it doesn’t give them the licence to pull down people. I have sent a legal notice to the producers and asked for an apology publicly for defamation,” avers Ravi, who is currently working in Ekta Kapoor’s Kahaani Humare Mahaabharat Ki… [Link]
on Sunday, August 31st, 2008, 6:33 pm in Humor, Video clips › 
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Jerry Springer-ism has arrived in mera bharat mahan.
funny you caught the ‘lower socioeconomic status’ bit. i thought so too, as in ‘you dont know your own position’ - and it made me feel a little ill. anyway - the premise of the show is pretty odd - as per the googlewhacked link. three people haze contestants and the show ends with the contestants eating vermin or such. the reward is 50,000 Rs which doesnt seem liek all that much. the only positive thing is that it finally shuts up people-are-not-civilized-here-look-at-their-tv-shows-uncle/auntie.
the premise for this show is totally ridiculous. furthermore, as a woman *and* a feminist, i’m offended by esha’s “character” and see her as a blight upon humankind. i hope that poor guy slapped her really, really hard before he got his butt kicked.
I am kinda in 2 minds about this. One one hand, you just can’t beat up on a woman, just not cool, but on the other hand, you gotta defend yourself. Just wondering. Could the guy who was slapped (Akash), have sued the bitch (Sorry, I cant come up with anything else) for assault? What are the rules in India regarding this?
I dont get the socioeconomic part of this? He got slapped because he was poorer then she was?
So wait, I’m confused. What did they say that made you think it was about low socioeconomic status?
I don’t understand Hindi.
i cant speak for manish - but i got from the cringing, the bawling, the repeated use of the word ’sir’, that the guy’s whipped and used to being trodden upon. i’ve seen something very simiar, similar to this, where the bully KNEW he had the right to beat up the other. yea i am chickenshit. i did nothing. i loathe urban india fyi. fuck it.
that said, there’s a guy growling and shouting outside my vindow right now. Sher khan here is going to turn the lights out and type in the dark.
yea, she’s gotta control the dominatrix inside her.
Totally uncool on her part to even have started it. Bitch got what was coming to her.
His slap was more of a knee-jerk reaction and I would have probably done the same without thinking (hence a knee-jerk reaction).
The big guy that jumps over a whole bunch of other guys when the slapper is already being beaten yells out ‘aukaat’ a couple of times - as in teri yeh aukaat kaisay huiee? Basically, how dare you! Aukaat could mean ‘audacity’ in context, but usually means ’status’, as in - if you had the status you could have had the audacity.
Shame on the show and the channel, and the producers and its owners. Anything for ratings. It’s bad enough here, but in India!? Ok, not all things are the same everywhere, and some premises just don’t travel. Just a few weeks ago, a
personcontestant drowned in an Indian reality show when submerged in water for something like ten minutes - that being the dare.What I see here is a bunch of more than two dozen pseudo-alpha males beating up on a smaller guy till he was yelping - on the pretext of his having hit a woman - and that was just the pretext. And for all I know, she dared slap him only because he was ‘lower status’ - small in size, and not entirely coincidentally. If she could slap him, and I don’t know how that could be allowed in the rules, then he sure as hell could slap her back, in my book.
And can we start calling these ‘reality shows’ artificiality shows? Not that this thing couldn’t have happened in Delhi or Bombay any day of the week, but the God-effing pseudo-chivalry on Indian streets kills me, as it nearly did this guy.
Lets all be clear here. There’s only one culprit to blame this on : Testosterone.
She had a bit of it, he had a bit of it, and the crowd had a bit of it.
Thats all folks.
No, not just testosterone. There’s something peculiarly Indian about her thinking it was OK to slap him (just like her mummy pbly slaps “the help” at home) without him responding in kind (and yes, he had the right to strike back despite her gender). There’s something peculiarly Indian about the mob that formed to reassert the pecking order. This is typical behavior for the creamy layers of Indian society. I bet I could get a reality show called “Orphan Fight” greenlighted in Mumbai
Outside of the comments above, what I’ve recently found a bit odd with Indian reality contests like this one is the inclusion of drama as if it’s Real World. If you’ve ever watched the singing contests like SaReGaMaPa or the others out there, there tends to be this additional drama brought about in backstage footage or the judges arguing over whether a contestant should be allowed into the competition, etc. What’s up with that? Imagine Fear Factor or American Idol where the judges outright argue with each other (okay, a drugged Paula Abdul should be argued with) or yell at the contestants. Just weird, I say.
I feel a bit ill after watching that. Reacting in kind to an assault is totally fair game. That woman really took a liberty there. As to which liberty, I’m inclined to believe Manish’s theory that it was the socioeconomic, but I’d like to know what he had said to her to make her that angry in the first place.
did anyone hear the talking in the background? at 1:52 you can hear two ladies talking…and one of them says (esha, i guess), “I just thought he would be briefed about it” and the other lady says that “he was”…
would they really ask their contestants to be slapped around on tv for 50,000 rupees?
They just removed the vid from youtube, has anyone saved it? We call spread on P2P/torrents..
Tagged under Humor? Should come with an rider noting it is only so for people of an ‘aukaad’ high enough to appreciate the hilarity of underclass defiance :)
It could also be tagged under Accidental Reality. Khoofia, this video (still available on Youtube http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4yEUuXp7iK4) really is a lot like the one you linked to.
Actually, the Jat-machismo inflected English is rather funny. “You Baarshturddd!…”
Did anyone hear the fake sobbing? I assume it be to fake, since I work with some reality shows here in La-La land. But, I noticed when Esha walks off camera, her voice is right next to the camera, and a few gratuitous sobs are heard. But, I couldn’t hear the briefing comment. Competing for the money is fair game, but violence is not. We have security guards on VH1 shows on stand by, for the temptuous vixens, but Esha was totally out of line to smack him. Too much power tripping going on.
It’s not just her security, it’s his that I’m worried about. And any sobs I heard were his, I thought.
How could they have allowed this swarming, is what I ask. That’s what you have security guards for. And I agree, this does happen in life, both in the West and in India, although it shouldn’t - and certainly should not have been allowed to happen on a TV show.
All I see in the near-lynching is that the presumed insult to a woman’s person became the pretext for so much gratuitous , hierarchy-reinforcing, male-on-male violence. Perhaps in that way, unwittingly mirroring the sociological reality of most patriarchal societies, and ironically justifying the genre ‘reality show’.
BTW, Dari, by ‘temptuous’ - did you mean ‘contemptuous’, ‘tempting’, or ‘tempestuous’? ;)
Oops, yes Chachaji, I was referring to our tempestuous talent.
just when you thought Indian TV channels could not sink any lower
I finally got a better handle on this after checking the link to ‘Dadagiri’. The premise of the show is college ragging, a form of hazing freshmen are subjected to - the ‘Sir’ wasn’t a socioeconomic thing, it was the freshman-senior thing. When ragging is on, freshmen are required to address seniors as ‘Sir’ (or ‘Ma’am). In this case, what separates the girl and the guy is also their level of English fluency - hers is slightly better than his. However, since the level of English fluency is fairly well correlated with SES, one can assume there was that issue in the background as well. The sense of entitlement and privilege a person feels in any given situation is also well correlated with English fluency.
So here’s what happened:
He tells her he doesn’t want to talk to her, but she’s power tripping and tells him to FO - and he, initially refusing to react, stays calm and smiles, ignoring her supposedly higher status, and perhaps a tiny bit, asserting his male privilege. Not sure of the exact retort, he tells her ‘you go’ . Incensed, even though he stays clear of expletives, she slaps him. Though the entitlement and SES are factors here, it is really just power tripping gone awry.
As far as the reality component, this is exactly how I think things would have played out in real life. But that doesn’t mean I like the show, or the idea of ‘reality shows’ in general.
No, not just testosterone. There’s something peculiarly Indian about her thinking it was OK to slap him (just like her mummy pbly slaps “the help” at home)
Very well put.
Chachaji: Interesting analysis in #21. What about the ‘aukaat’ comment? That leads me to believe that Manish is correct about the SES angle.
You gotta wonder about a guy who slaps a woman, but cannot defend himself against another man. Knee-jerk response, yes, but an overall lack of courage stands out more so. While get his arse kicked, he didn’t seem to have that same angry tone, but rather a whimpering defenseless one.
Saw this clips a few days ago, and was wondering what happened. I figured the guy might take the producers to court…
The funny thing is that he talks about the tapes somehow being leakes. The channel - Bindass? - had put it on Youtube when I saw it.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/TV_Buzz/Ravi_is_upset/articleshow/3436967.cms
Nineteen-year-old Ravi Bhatia is all over news channels past few days.
This small town boy has dashed off a legal notice to the makers of Dadagiri. He’s upset with what happened on the reality show. Reality shows may have their fixed scripts and sensational turn of events, but Ravi is in no mood to take things lying down.
“This incident occurred four months ago. The participants of the show had to pass through the litmus test of abuses and spats. And it was all scripted! We were all given our parts where 70 per cent was to be said as is and 30 per cent would be improvisations,” says Ravi. “There was this girl called Isha opposite me who was supposed to abuse me and I was to retaliate, but calmly. After a while when it came to improvisations, I presume she was out of words and came and slapped me hard. I was shocked and in the heat of the moment, I slapped her back. That led to the entire unit of about 70 people jumping on me beating me black and blue. It was a miracle in itself that I managed to escape from there,” he says.
So how did this incident get flashed in the media now? “Luckily for me, somehow the tapes got leaked out and they were being shown on all the channels. I got myself a copy from one of the news channels and was happy that finally I acquired the proof to support me. And this time I will not be quiet. Just because they have power, it doesn’t give them the licence to pull down people. I have sent a legal notice to the producers and asked for an apology publicly for defamation,” avers Ravi, who is currently working in Ekta Kapoor’s Kahaani Humare Mahaabharat Ki on 9X.
Nauseating. Reminds of a commencement address where the Professor sagaciously observed, “I’ll overlook your generation created the RealWorld”. I wonder in 50 years if we’ll look back at this trash-reality-TV with a condescending “what garbage they used to watch” attitude.
Probably not. Humans can’t keep their eyes off trainwreck-TV.
Dari, you’re kidding, right? Chachaji makes an interesting point in saying that the guy may have been asserting his male privilege in the verbal exchange… BUT he slapped her only in response to her slapping him first. And he couldn’t defend himself against another man because it wasn’t just one man, it was a mob of men who ganged up on him and physically and verbally assaulted him even once they had him down. I know you’re trying to make a point about weak men who take their frustrations out on women, but it doesn’t hold here.
Isn’t there a high rate of domestic violence in Indian society? I always thought of Indian women as being very submissive. Not that this was right, but I was surprised at the male reaction to her slapping. I thought it was prevalent in India.
Wow… ain’t payback a bitch :D … I do not think the guy did anything wrong… that babe was not exactly kissing him… I would kick the hell out of any guy who slaps me.. so why should a girl be any different ??
we should make probability and measure theory teaching mandatory till the soph year. :-)
Bingo…
although wouldnt only be a mummy thing,
Its ok for “elders” to slap around other kids in the family.
Teachers to slap students, police to slap around any one.
There was a funny video of a female cop trying to act tough aunty enforcing morality at a park…
For such replies a punch works much better.
I was told of a case where a particularly abusive teacher got punched back, the kid did get thrown out but he school finaly clamped down on teachers crossing the line.
No!! A slap is never about causing bodily harm to the other person. A slap is a “tool” used to humiliate the other person.
Manish you called it (slap heard ’round the world). The video has made the homepage of TMZ.com.
Its an offense and a violation of the other person. A stronger and more forceful fist is much better at getting the message across to them.
umm… Dont get carried away guys. the guy’s lucky he got it caught on tape. the law + society always takes the side of the women and mocks the man for getting ‘whipped’. popular media abounds with picturization wherein the woman smacks the guy to the accompaniment of a laugh track. It is totally socially acceptable for women to hit guys around. so be careful, especially those guys in relationships - violence is never the answer - but do keep it in mind that the best alternative for a guy in such a situation is to walk away from a relationship rather than get into a fight. you will be financially and emotionally ruined by the time society’s done with you.