After watching a lot of Shark Tank India (now streaming on SonyLIV) over the past few weeks, I have come to a number of conclusions. For one, I am quite certain that not one of the judges understands the first thing about either the metaverse or cryptocurrency, two things they are inordinately fond of talking about (they also seem to fund anybody with a pulse who talks about these things).
For another, I am quite certain that I once saw Ashneer Grover — the most in-your-face aggressive of all the judges — yelling at a parking attendant in Saket (a neighbourhood in South Delhi); in retrospect, a most on-brand introduction to the currently beleaguered BharatPe co-founder. It’s the cruel eyes, the same brand of unthinking cruelty that drips off his tongue and onto our screens when he insults people using words like “ dogala” (two-faced, literally, in Hindi).
Grover, then, is the Simon Cowell of Shark Tank India. Cowell was famously dismissive of a lot of contestants through the 2000s on American Idol. It set a trend in reality TV where judges would insult contestants for laughs — occasionally, there would be pathos involved but mostly it would be like a stand-up comedian ‘roasting’ a colleague onstage. Some of Cowell’s most famous putdowns include, “If you had lived 2,000 years ago and sung like that, I think they would have stoned you”; “I’m tempted to ask if you sang that the night before your wife left you”; and “You sounded like three cats being dragged up the motorway”. On one downright distasteful occasion, he told a young woman, “I mean I’m not being rude but you look like the Incredible Hulk’s wife.”
With time, Cowell’s network bosses told him to cut it out or at the very least, tone it down. After Cowell’s departure, new judge Jennifer Lopez went to the other extreme. American Idol became a show that was all about positive vibes and good-natured competition among mild-mannered people. As with the previous trend, everybody followed suit. The Voice, most notably, leaned into the niceness and ate away at American Idol’s ratings. Judges were a support structure on the show, not dreaded monoliths tasked with separating the wheat from the chaff.
Plain bullying
Should a reality show judge aim to be a Simon Cowell or a Jennifer Lopez? It could be argued that all reality shows need a certain amount of emotionally high-stakes situations, a certain amount of friction to keep things interesting. And a relentlessly positive approach, like the one Lopez favoured, may be incompatible with that vision. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that Cowell and his legion of imitators across the reality TV genre went too far, often devolving into plain bullying. Take MTV’s Roadies, for example. The judges, Raghu Ram, Rajiv Lakshman, and Rannvijay Singha (and many others down the years) have racked up an impressive YouTube ‘bully playlist’, if you will. I urge you to pick a clip, any clip really.
The point of most talent hunt reality TV is to audition for class mobility. Your performance on the show decides whether you’re bumped up into the judges’ societal class. This was true for Rock Star: Supernova all those years ago and it’s every bit as true today for Shark Tank India. It’s a clique performance on the part of judges like Cowell — they seek to underline the power differential while also dangling the unspoken carrot. You too can behave badly, goes the message, once you are one of us. But before that can happen, hoops of fire await.
Aditya Mani Jha is a writer and journalist working on his first book of non-fiction.
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