Hey desi ad world,
I just wondered what your thoughts were on Shilpa and British Big Brother,
I hear the indian press is covered with the indian beauty.
I don't think they're showing BB over in India but all the desi's in the UK are hooked on BB or should I say watching Shilpa.
Well my mum's keeping me updated so if you want any news, give us a shout.
D
Big Brother Fans ... SHILPA Fans!
Moderators: kikikikikiki, diptanshu, Dalbir
Big Brother Fans ... SHILPA Fans!
Desi says above all, 'apni boli ta apna des kadi na puli'
Yo Denesh! Kiddan!
I have been a little out of touch with TV lately and have little clue about BB. All I know is Shilpa Shetty is in some reality show called BB.
And this is what I read in today's paper :
How can we get that?
btw: Dalbir, ECD Ogilvy Budapest (also a very active participant in desicreative) is visiting London this coming week, I think. Why dont you guys hook up for a Desis' night out!
I have been a little out of touch with TV lately and have little clue about BB. All I know is Shilpa Shetty is in some reality show called BB.
And this is what I read in today's paper :
I would loke to see one of these episodes, INCLUDING the advertising that it attracts in UK (considering a leading Indian Actoress is taking part, I am sure they have a lot of India-centric advertising.Shilpa faces racial abuse on British TV
Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, participating in UK's reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, is allegedly the target of racist attacks by fellow contestants, some of whom called her a 'dog' and drove her to tears, prompting producers of the show to probe into the matter'
How can we get that?
btw: Dalbir, ECD Ogilvy Budapest (also a very active participant in desicreative) is visiting London this coming week, I think. Why dont you guys hook up for a Desis' night out!
Kiddan Prava,
I'll definately drop Dalbir an email. Thanks for that.
Apparently there's an Indian version of Big Brother, 'Big Boss' have you watched it?
UK Big Brother, the live reality tv show has received much criticism in the last few days as the 'three bitches' UK celebs are showing their ignorance and true self by bullying shilpa both mentally and verbally.
This has caused outrage internationally, it really is shocking!
Read this:
'Why does everyone hate me?'
Thousands of viewers have complained about the racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother. But we should not be surprised by the housemates' behaviour - it reflects the widespread bigotry of British society, says Germaine Greer. Novelist Hari Kunzru pays tribute to the Bollywood star's grace under fire.
Germaine Greer and Hari Kunzru
Wednesday January 17, 2007
The Guardian
There are no good reasons for watching Celebrity Big Brother and very good reasons for not. Not watching will spare you the nerve-fraying annoyingness that is Shilpa Shetty. Everything about her is infuriating: her haughty way of stalking about, her indomitable self-confidence, her chandelier earrings, her leaping eyebrows, her mirthless smile, her putty nose and her eternal bray, "Why does everyone hate me?" Not to mention the crying jags. What no one seems to have quite understood is that Shilpa is a very good actress. Everyone hates her because she wants them to. She also knows that if she infuriates people enough, their innate racism will spew forth.
As a Tamil, Shetty has certainly had to deal with discrimination at home in suburban Mumbai. Her only motive for parading in front of the other women in the house with whitener on her face was to show what utter hicks they are, how little they understand of her complex reality or of a billion people in the subcontinent who all want to have wheat-coloured skin. I bet thousands of brown-skinned girls in Southall fell off the sofa laughing when she did that.
Bollywood is no picnic; anyone who makes 51 Bollywood movies in 13 years has to be tough. Shilpa has a black belt in karate. She is just the girl to raise the pit bull in a dizzy little drip like Danielle and keep her frothing at the mouth long enough for her nascent career as a sweet little Wag to disappear down the drain. When Shilpa is finished with Danielle even Teddy Sheringham will know what a small, dark heart beats within her fetching chest. This explains the slightly cannibal air of self-satisfaction that never abandons Shilpa. She knows what she is doing. She will shred the nerves of all the other women in that house until even Cleo pulls back her frozen lips and shows the fangs behind her witless Mona Lisa smile.
I can switch Shilpa off. The people in the house with her haven't got that option. The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the ass Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her. So Danielle, beside herself with rage because Shilpa cooks with onions, calls her a dog. Jack Tweed calls her a cunt. The word was bleeped out, leading many viewers to speculate that she had been racially abused. That is not surprising. This is a racist country; to the vast majority of couch potatoes out there, Shilpa is a "Paki bird".
Jackiey's inability to pronounce Shilpa's name had less to do with failure to conceal her own racism than the fact that she has no idea how to spell anything. Shilpa is not allowed to write anything in the house, so she can't show them how the name is spelled, and even if she did, they would still flounder, just as she did when she pronounced Dirk as Duck.
It should be possible for both sides to make fun of each other's accents, without pushing the racism button. Shilpa has tried, a weeny bit, but her only real subject is herself. The cockney glottal stop means that the likes of Jade Goody are incapable of pronouncing an L before a P. They have never seen a Hindi movie and never heard of Shilpa Shetty, or even Sharukh Khan, and they probably don't have any Indian friends. In that, they are like most of the Caucasians who live in this country. Separation breeds division, as we are always told when the subject is religious schools in Ulster, but there is almost no inter-penetration of English and Indian cultures in Britain. Even people who go out once a week for "an Indian" don't realise and don't care that they are almost certain to be in a Sylheti restaurant. (Sylhet is part of Bangladesh.)
Shilpa likes to be seen cooking. She looks utterly virtuous while she is doing it, she doesn't have to try to converse with the women in the house, she gets to eat food she likes, spice it any way she chooses and time it to please herself. It is a perfect ploy to drive everyone else crazy. Jermaine and Dirk are wise to her little game and quite amused to see how the cat-fights are developing. Jo, Jade and Danielle are miles behind the eight-ball; only Jack is further out of it.
Endemol must be over the moon because racism has raised its ugly head. Every time someone sends in a complaint to Ofcom about racism in the Big Brother house, the profile of the show is raised and Shilpa earns a bit more of her huge fee. But it's a funny old world, to be sure. You can call her a "dog". Sexism is fine. What you mustn't do is call her a "Paki". As if to be Pakistani was to be worse than being a dog. Our very tenderness on this issue is the flip side of racism, and still part of the same coin. If you call me an Aussie you don't insult me because Aussieness is OK. Pakiness is evidently not OK.
The brouhaha about racism in the Big Brother house is a smoke screen that conceals what is really vicious and corrupting about CBB. Plain, everyday, common or garden bullying supplies the motive force for everything that happens in the Big Brother house. Big Brother disorients the housemates and disrupts their perceptions so that they become literally unbalanced. They have nothing to gain but their fee for enduring this destructive process, and so far three housemates have decided that if they remained in the house they stood to lose more than they had to gain. Although their behaviour seemed irrational at the time, because they were forced "greatly to find quarrel in a straw", it was actually supremely rational. So far none of the women has been that smart. Except for Shilpa. Shilpa's enjoying herself. Ladbroke's are quoting her 10/3 favourite.
It was a very ugly piece of TV
As soon as Shilpa Shetty arrived, announcing that she hadn't really seen the show, I knew there would be trouble. She is a huge star, a much bigger deal than any of the other contestants. It is as if Cameron Diaz or Scarlett Johansson were in there. The others, for the most part, showed their almost total ignorance of and lack of curiosity about India, which she has dealt with more politely than I would have. She is recognisably middle-class Indian in her good manners and her forthrightness, as well as her occasional nerdiness and her unconscious pomposity.
Actually, she reminds me slightly of one of my cousins. When Ken Russell was cold at night, she put an extra coverlet over him, just as any well-brought-up young person would do for an elder who was in discomfort. In India, the audience would have been wiping away a tear; Jackiey Goody abused her, thinking Shilpa was sucking up. That's the cultural difference in a nutshell. Jackiey's refusal to learn her name was straightforwardly racist - every British Asian will have had that conversation at least once, complete with self-righteous complaints about the "difficulty" of the task. It was a very ugly piece of TV and I'm glad people have felt uncomfortable enough to complain. Likewise about the accent-mimicking. But then, we're only a generation from when It Ain't Half Hot Mum was family entertainment. This is what Big Brother is for. It holds a mirror up to national attitudes. If we don't like what we see, we ought to change.
I'll definately drop Dalbir an email. Thanks for that.
Apparently there's an Indian version of Big Brother, 'Big Boss' have you watched it?
UK Big Brother, the live reality tv show has received much criticism in the last few days as the 'three bitches' UK celebs are showing their ignorance and true self by bullying shilpa both mentally and verbally.
This has caused outrage internationally, it really is shocking!
Read this:
'Why does everyone hate me?'
Thousands of viewers have complained about the racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty on Big Brother. But we should not be surprised by the housemates' behaviour - it reflects the widespread bigotry of British society, says Germaine Greer. Novelist Hari Kunzru pays tribute to the Bollywood star's grace under fire.
Germaine Greer and Hari Kunzru
Wednesday January 17, 2007
The Guardian
There are no good reasons for watching Celebrity Big Brother and very good reasons for not. Not watching will spare you the nerve-fraying annoyingness that is Shilpa Shetty. Everything about her is infuriating: her haughty way of stalking about, her indomitable self-confidence, her chandelier earrings, her leaping eyebrows, her mirthless smile, her putty nose and her eternal bray, "Why does everyone hate me?" Not to mention the crying jags. What no one seems to have quite understood is that Shilpa is a very good actress. Everyone hates her because she wants them to. She also knows that if she infuriates people enough, their innate racism will spew forth.
As a Tamil, Shetty has certainly had to deal with discrimination at home in suburban Mumbai. Her only motive for parading in front of the other women in the house with whitener on her face was to show what utter hicks they are, how little they understand of her complex reality or of a billion people in the subcontinent who all want to have wheat-coloured skin. I bet thousands of brown-skinned girls in Southall fell off the sofa laughing when she did that.
Bollywood is no picnic; anyone who makes 51 Bollywood movies in 13 years has to be tough. Shilpa has a black belt in karate. She is just the girl to raise the pit bull in a dizzy little drip like Danielle and keep her frothing at the mouth long enough for her nascent career as a sweet little Wag to disappear down the drain. When Shilpa is finished with Danielle even Teddy Sheringham will know what a small, dark heart beats within her fetching chest. This explains the slightly cannibal air of self-satisfaction that never abandons Shilpa. She knows what she is doing. She will shred the nerves of all the other women in that house until even Cleo pulls back her frozen lips and shows the fangs behind her witless Mona Lisa smile.
I can switch Shilpa off. The people in the house with her haven't got that option. The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the ass Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her. So Danielle, beside herself with rage because Shilpa cooks with onions, calls her a dog. Jack Tweed calls her a cunt. The word was bleeped out, leading many viewers to speculate that she had been racially abused. That is not surprising. This is a racist country; to the vast majority of couch potatoes out there, Shilpa is a "Paki bird".
Jackiey's inability to pronounce Shilpa's name had less to do with failure to conceal her own racism than the fact that she has no idea how to spell anything. Shilpa is not allowed to write anything in the house, so she can't show them how the name is spelled, and even if she did, they would still flounder, just as she did when she pronounced Dirk as Duck.
It should be possible for both sides to make fun of each other's accents, without pushing the racism button. Shilpa has tried, a weeny bit, but her only real subject is herself. The cockney glottal stop means that the likes of Jade Goody are incapable of pronouncing an L before a P. They have never seen a Hindi movie and never heard of Shilpa Shetty, or even Sharukh Khan, and they probably don't have any Indian friends. In that, they are like most of the Caucasians who live in this country. Separation breeds division, as we are always told when the subject is religious schools in Ulster, but there is almost no inter-penetration of English and Indian cultures in Britain. Even people who go out once a week for "an Indian" don't realise and don't care that they are almost certain to be in a Sylheti restaurant. (Sylhet is part of Bangladesh.)
Shilpa likes to be seen cooking. She looks utterly virtuous while she is doing it, she doesn't have to try to converse with the women in the house, she gets to eat food she likes, spice it any way she chooses and time it to please herself. It is a perfect ploy to drive everyone else crazy. Jermaine and Dirk are wise to her little game and quite amused to see how the cat-fights are developing. Jo, Jade and Danielle are miles behind the eight-ball; only Jack is further out of it.
Endemol must be over the moon because racism has raised its ugly head. Every time someone sends in a complaint to Ofcom about racism in the Big Brother house, the profile of the show is raised and Shilpa earns a bit more of her huge fee. But it's a funny old world, to be sure. You can call her a "dog". Sexism is fine. What you mustn't do is call her a "Paki". As if to be Pakistani was to be worse than being a dog. Our very tenderness on this issue is the flip side of racism, and still part of the same coin. If you call me an Aussie you don't insult me because Aussieness is OK. Pakiness is evidently not OK.
The brouhaha about racism in the Big Brother house is a smoke screen that conceals what is really vicious and corrupting about CBB. Plain, everyday, common or garden bullying supplies the motive force for everything that happens in the Big Brother house. Big Brother disorients the housemates and disrupts their perceptions so that they become literally unbalanced. They have nothing to gain but their fee for enduring this destructive process, and so far three housemates have decided that if they remained in the house they stood to lose more than they had to gain. Although their behaviour seemed irrational at the time, because they were forced "greatly to find quarrel in a straw", it was actually supremely rational. So far none of the women has been that smart. Except for Shilpa. Shilpa's enjoying herself. Ladbroke's are quoting her 10/3 favourite.
It was a very ugly piece of TV
As soon as Shilpa Shetty arrived, announcing that she hadn't really seen the show, I knew there would be trouble. She is a huge star, a much bigger deal than any of the other contestants. It is as if Cameron Diaz or Scarlett Johansson were in there. The others, for the most part, showed their almost total ignorance of and lack of curiosity about India, which she has dealt with more politely than I would have. She is recognisably middle-class Indian in her good manners and her forthrightness, as well as her occasional nerdiness and her unconscious pomposity.
Actually, she reminds me slightly of one of my cousins. When Ken Russell was cold at night, she put an extra coverlet over him, just as any well-brought-up young person would do for an elder who was in discomfort. In India, the audience would have been wiping away a tear; Jackiey Goody abused her, thinking Shilpa was sucking up. That's the cultural difference in a nutshell. Jackiey's refusal to learn her name was straightforwardly racist - every British Asian will have had that conversation at least once, complete with self-righteous complaints about the "difficulty" of the task. It was a very ugly piece of TV and I'm glad people have felt uncomfortable enough to complain. Likewise about the accent-mimicking. But then, we're only a generation from when It Ain't Half Hot Mum was family entertainment. This is what Big Brother is for. It holds a mirror up to national attitudes. If we don't like what we see, we ought to change.
Desi says above all, 'apni boli ta apna des kadi na puli'
yo Prava!
a little comment from the piece:
About her having to struggle thgrough Bollywood, its true. Bollywood is a circus and a nightmare at the same time. But it also helps if you are born into the industry, which she was.
Applying white paint to appear fairer on the screen is an old Indian 'secret' and even Rekha has done it.
As for the brouhaha over BB racial allegations et al, I think they are all part of the script, because earlier if anyone was NOT watching the show, he/she is googling for it now, if not searching franctically for the channel!
Great PR handling folks! Bad publicity is better than NO publicity!
a little comment from the piece:
Mumbai is an extremely cosmopolitan city and the Tamils, especially the Shettys, are an integral part of the city. They own all the restaurants, dance-bars, udupi joints, bars and nightclubs etc. They are a very strong part of mumbai culture and I doubt if Shilpa Shetty had to face ANY amount of discrimination.As a Tamil, Shetty has certainly had to deal with discrimination at home in suburban Mumbai.
About her having to struggle thgrough Bollywood, its true. Bollywood is a circus and a nightmare at the same time. But it also helps if you are born into the industry, which she was.
not true. the billion people in this subcontinent ALL want to have white skin. the largest chunk of beautry products sold here is Skin Fairness Creams (in all unfairness), and a premium is laid on a fair skinned bride or groom. Ask anyone from here, who hasnt heard of 'Fair and Lovely'. Heck we even have a 'Fair and Handsome' now!!or of a billion people in the subcontinent who all want to have wheat-coloured skin.
Applying white paint to appear fairer on the screen is an old Indian 'secret' and even Rekha has done it.
As for the brouhaha over BB racial allegations et al, I think they are all part of the script, because earlier if anyone was NOT watching the show, he/she is googling for it now, if not searching franctically for the channel!
Great PR handling folks! Bad publicity is better than NO publicity!
-
drain bamaged
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Sun Dec 31, 2006 12:59 pm
- Location: mumbai
- Contact:
-
encyclomedia
- Site Admin
- Posts: 491
- Joined: Fri Apr 07, 2006 2:27 pm
Honeymoon over for shilpa shetty
from the times of india/rahul dias/times news network
celebrityhood and controversy are strange bedfellows. And who better than shilpa shetty to validate this statement. After almost being 'beatified' by the british public, thanks to her winning megabucks in the uk reality show, BIG BROTHER, and thus finding a place in the hearts of the 'stiff upper lipped sorts', shilpa is now facing a barrage of bad press-all in the last few days, raking up the so called skeletons in her closet. Ranging to her being called a home breaker to her alleged links with the underworld to her parents' recent brush with the law on charges of extortion, her past is being examined with microscopic precision, nose job et al. So is the proverbial honeymoon period over for shilpa and the brits?
according to a recent report in the Daily Mail, which talks of the 'Shocking story of the REAL Shilpa Shetty', the actor's mother, Sunanda' has been laeblled a real domineering mother, who 'rules her daughter's life'. Besides delving into her alleged underworld links and her alleged affair with the much married Anubhav Sinha, it also goes on to talk about how 'you don't have to be in Bombay ong to discover the saintly image Shilpa enjoys in Britain is a far cry from the way shes seen at home'.
Even her celebrity status in bombay is being questioned. A BBC south asia bureau report goes on to say that 'contrary to much of the reporting around the world, Shilpa Shetty is not a major bollywood star. 'If she was, she would not have shared a stage with British B-Grade celebrities, also stuck inside the Big Brother house.'
'Shilpa Shetty's dark side', screams a headline in the Sawf News Connect, that speaks of the '31 year old beauty's parents Surendra and Sunanda Shetty, who have been charged with extortion and also about the exploitation of their factory workers'.
Interestingly there are even some anti Shilpa blogs in britain, that have entries which grudge the fact that she has managed to 'effortlessly procure a work permit while others have to go through a rigourous process that takes almost six months with no easy access. So why should Shilpa get it instantaneously?'.
i for one am dying to see Shilpa in a new movie now. Post Big Brother.
from the times of india/rahul dias/times news network
celebrityhood and controversy are strange bedfellows. And who better than shilpa shetty to validate this statement. After almost being 'beatified' by the british public, thanks to her winning megabucks in the uk reality show, BIG BROTHER, and thus finding a place in the hearts of the 'stiff upper lipped sorts', shilpa is now facing a barrage of bad press-all in the last few days, raking up the so called skeletons in her closet. Ranging to her being called a home breaker to her alleged links with the underworld to her parents' recent brush with the law on charges of extortion, her past is being examined with microscopic precision, nose job et al. So is the proverbial honeymoon period over for shilpa and the brits?
according to a recent report in the Daily Mail, which talks of the 'Shocking story of the REAL Shilpa Shetty', the actor's mother, Sunanda' has been laeblled a real domineering mother, who 'rules her daughter's life'. Besides delving into her alleged underworld links and her alleged affair with the much married Anubhav Sinha, it also goes on to talk about how 'you don't have to be in Bombay ong to discover the saintly image Shilpa enjoys in Britain is a far cry from the way shes seen at home'.
Even her celebrity status in bombay is being questioned. A BBC south asia bureau report goes on to say that 'contrary to much of the reporting around the world, Shilpa Shetty is not a major bollywood star. 'If she was, she would not have shared a stage with British B-Grade celebrities, also stuck inside the Big Brother house.'
'Shilpa Shetty's dark side', screams a headline in the Sawf News Connect, that speaks of the '31 year old beauty's parents Surendra and Sunanda Shetty, who have been charged with extortion and also about the exploitation of their factory workers'.
Interestingly there are even some anti Shilpa blogs in britain, that have entries which grudge the fact that she has managed to 'effortlessly procure a work permit while others have to go through a rigourous process that takes almost six months with no easy access. So why should Shilpa get it instantaneously?'.
i for one am dying to see Shilpa in a new movie now. Post Big Brother.
