Bollywood's Mean Girls

Shilpa Shetty, a Bollywood actress who is famous within India, but hardly known outside India (with the exception of Non-resident Indians -- Indians who live abroad) has had a tough time making friends on a reality tv show.

The show’s female contestants, known for their “has-been” status or general Paris Hilton-esque rise to fame (trashy, promiscuous, catty behavior) aren’t too keen to be her new best friend. And unfortunately for her, they are all locked in a house and video-recorded 24 hours a day.

Living with catty girls is mentally exhausting. Trust me.

For Shilpa Shetty, this biting reality is compounded by the massive culture shock she encountered stepping out of her Bollywood identity, and into a house full of B-List clueless British celebrities. And I imagine there would also be a minor identity crisis with the complete loss of her cinematic quasi-royalty status. No one knows who she is in Britain.

So, without any famous, glamorous movie starlet reputation from which to derive confidence and entitlement, she’s reduced to being a “nobody” again. Now she has to figure out a way to negotiate respect without the intimidating “celebrity factor” to back her up.

I would imagine that no one has been mean to this girl in ages. No wonder she’s bawling on every episode.

But, where it gets compounded is when this catty female bullying is turned into a race issue. A very hot topic...

25,000 supporters of Shilpa have signed an internet petition demanding that the show’s producers end the racism, basically atoning for their sins and cancel the show. Thus, restoring their beloved Shilpa’s integrity.

Many people are complaining about the show: If the cat fights are indeed cases of blatant racism, or just unfair reality TV bullying.

But aren’t we missing the other issues? As Germaine Greer pointed out in her article which somewhat defends Shilpa, no one seems to be bothered by the fact that her feminine qualities are also being degraded in addition to “racist” remarks. The focus is on the cultural bigotry, instead of treating all the insults equally.

The public nerve is struck only when her ethnic qualities are the topic of a joke.

“Every time someone sends in a complaint to Ofcom [Show’s producers] 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.”

Out of the thousands of articles floating around the internet on this issue, Germaine Greer’s is the only to call into question why we are solely focused on the race issue. Yes, those other people in the house are probably bigoted. But why has no one found it upsetting that disparaging remarks were also made against her femininity? Is it too routine and inconsequential to call women bad names?

Only if those names are somehow related to her ethnicity, then you’ve got a problem. As long as there is no discernable racial connection to the insults, name-calling and derogatory remarks are perfectly natural.

Is being mean on any level acceptable? No. Are people jealous, racist, and/or catty? Of course. And isn't reality television just a horrible idea anyway?

After all is said and done, she is getting paid a nice sum of $700,000 USD for her troubles. Rumored to be more than her total career earnings in India... Not to mention the invaluable publicity! She'll never have to worry about not being unknown again.

Greer's Article

Diversity's Relevance

One of my latest and probably more complex projects is to begin addressing “diversity” at my company. With a recently opened “diversity office” and ambitious plans to become a major global IT services provider, the matter of workplace diversity (or lack thereof) is an issue that must be addressed before any global dominance can be established.

So the first challenge is taking a workforce that is largely (almost oppressively) homogenous, and conveying the indisputable importance of cultivating superficial and deep diversity. Communicating the implications and long-term benefits of creating and maintaining a diversity strategy to the average employee will be difficult.

Most of my coworkers (with exceptions) are individuals who rarely associate with others outside their community – residents of the most privileged group of high-caste, wealthy middle class graduates of the country’s top educational institutions (IIT/IIM).

Then there’s the patriarchal, subtly sexist corporate culture to confront.

And also, integrating both concepts of national and international-related diversity into the framework.

A good starting place to bring all employees onto the same page, is to abstract “diversity” to its fundamental basis. But after hearing about this concept for years, at school, through the media, even in cinema, I’m almost too deeply entrenched to make an objective statement!