Dear Simi Garewal

My Open Letter to the host of the celebrity talk show "Simi Selects India's Most Desirable", which ran on Star World India from June to November 2011. It was unpublished. The GQ Men of the Year awards were screened on Star World India in October 2011.

Dear Simi Garewal

It wasn’t until days after we'd watched the first episode of your new chatshow that it finally hit us, like a bunny in pink satin bows smacking us round the head with a huge slab of chocolate: Simi Selects India’s Most Desirable is a work of genius.

We’d thought your old show Rendezvous was schmaltzy, but then we watched Ranbir Kapoor hug random strangers, listen to his mother rave about how adorable he is, and see him somehow hold onto his smile while you told viewers: “Don’t be afraid of mama’s boys – they make the best husbands”. It was like watching a man strapped to a giant marshmallow being waterboarded in lemonade.

Now we get it, Simi, and we are awed. You know better than us about Bollywood star interviews: Getting one of these guys to say something interesting is like getting a dog to play a piano. Every now and then you hear a couple of notes that sound like the start of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, but the rest is just painful. This is because being interesting is dangerous. Being interesting means having an opinion, an opinion that might offend people who buy movie tickets and celebrity-endorsed products.

This is why movie stars lie so much. In a tight corner, they will dodge and weave. Ask a Bollywood actor, “Which colour do you prefer, red or blue?” and they will adopt one or more of the following tactics:

1) Go mercurial
“I like red. And I like blue. It depends what mood I’m in.”

2) Go egalitarian
“Don’t red and blue both have an equal place in the great spectrum of colours?”

3) Flatter the interviewer
“I don’t know but red and blue both look great on you!”

4) Go stupid
“I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it.”

5) Go patriotic
“I like all colours, but the best in the world are orange, white and green.”

6) Run to mummy
“I just like the colours my parents like.”

7) Take the fifth
“I have to work with both red and blue. I don’t want to upset anyone.”

8) Clam up
“I can’t answer that. It’s a very personal question.”

We thought there were only two ways to deal with this: a) keep beating them over the head with a question until they crack, or b) give up. But now, after watching Simi Selects… we see that you’ve found option c): Screw the interview; just humiliate them. Mercilessly parody them, and the entire celebrity chatshow format, and make it seem like family-friendly fun.

Here’s how you do it: First, hug them, repeatedly. Get them to play the guitar or sing songs, really badly. Invite their parents to embarrass them, and subliminally hint at a terrifying Oedipal fixation in Indian male sexuality. Get them to admit being attracted to someone, and get that person on the next episode to say that they don’t care. And then, finally, roleplay with them in the character of Kiki, a teasing, devilish mindfuck of your own invention, and watch them blink, open-mouthed, as they finally realise they have been hoodwinked into the lowest level of television hell.

This is why we think your show is genius, Simi. It is India’s first truly ironic, postmodern chat show, and you are its White Witch.

At least, that’s what we think is happening. Otherwise, why the hell would we keep watching it?

Er…