THE VANISHING LIE-0-METRE OR WHAT I LEARNED FROM KOFFEE WITH KARAN SEASON 8

This is a longer version of my weekly column Paronormal Activity.

 

 

 The finale of Koffee with Karan, in a season that set the bar low, featured Zeenat Aman and Neetu Singh. I wondered as I watched the strangely staccato proceedings, whether it was just because one Fabricare couch is not enough for two big lives? My mind kept going back to the more fluid fun in what is one of the show’s all-time best episodes – the finale of season 1 which also featured Zeenat Aman with Hema Malini. Even at the time they had seemed cooler than everyone else who had featured so far. Not only because they had the easy confidence of those who had led multi-layered lives and adventurous ones at that. But also, unlike the others, they no longer had any skin in that game. Their irreverence ran deeper, alluding to the discriminations and sexual exploitation they had survived in an unabashedly male-dominated industry.

 

That male domination was on full display in a Season 3 episode featuring Sanjay Dutt and Anil Kapoor, replete with bro-jokes off-colour remarks about women colleagues,  and an inherently conservative attitude to women.  An awkwardly perched third guest, Kangana Ranaut, who participated in the rapid fire but was not eligible to compete for a prize, revealed the power dynamics of the industry as this column noted then—and boy, has that cast a long shadow.

 

 

Conspicuous by its absence in that episode was something core to the show’s mischief and verve. The lie-o-metre, which was a buzzer KJo would gleefully press whenever guests gave politically correct answers to naughtily pointed questions about rivalries and affairs.

 

The lie-o-metre’s absence on the Kapoor-Dutt episode, indicated that apparently these men were not open to question and teasing. They could not even be asked about their ‘bad boy’ lives in detail, much less have those declarations picked apart.  Only they can make the jokes, only they can assert the “truth”, the heart of the #BoreMatKarYaar patriarchy whether in culture and politics (think who never wants to be interviewed and why).

 

Karan Johar himself seemed to buck this patriarchy to an extent through his quintessential queerness – a sexuality conveyed, not labelled. This quality came into its own in episodes like the one in which Deepika—declaring her belief in true love—and Sonam dished dirt on Ranbir Kapoor. It was through this rasa of queerness as an act, not just an identity, that the show loosened the corset of heteronormativity.

 

What then does it mean then that the lie-o-metre has completely disappeared from Kofee with Karan?

 

It surprised me when I went back to older seasons, to remember that each season was actually 25 episodes—and an entire recap episode devoted to season highlights – the funniest, most outrageous or spicy moments of episodes. The show was no poster for diversity and inclusion, but it had a quality once central to the movies -variety, the spice of life. Not representation for all, sure. But in terms of rasa, something for everyone.  At the time the coffee hamper was just a regular hamper really, with cookies, which many of us still called biscuits then – as did Hema Malini on the show.

 

The lie-o-metre celebrated double meanings and their ability to house subversive truths. It acknowledged that most of us have more than one side to us – personal, public, private, political, professional. What circulates in the interstices of these different facets? Constantly shifting relationships and emotions –love, hate, jealousy—morphed onto another game now gone from the show: love, marry, kill (a PG-13 version of the party game fuck-marry-kill).  Like an older “vulgar” or more unabashed popular cinema, the lie-o-metre acknowledged unacceptable but real feelings and uncategorizable relationships. Society may forbid these, but they are there nevertheless. Where should they go to be seen and felt? The movies –both in what they showed and the world they were made in—were a place where some (not all) social controls and propriety did not have as much hold and allowed us a glimpse of another sexual and emotional possibility, one removed from the very normative conventions of social life. It’s not a matter of idealising this world – but simply noting its ungoverned nature which set it apart from everyday life and provided a temptation away from this everyday life of staying in your ordained place in life. Earlier we consumed Stardust for this rasa. Kofee with Karan was television’s Stardust. Stardust was consumed a tad surreptitiously—not the magazine for the respectable. Koffee with Karan made it more permissible. What --happens-yaniki what is gained and what is lost—when the permissive becomes permissible?

 

 

Today, Koffee with Karan has only ten episodes. There is no season recap –the show knows there is no fun to relive as one might an ill-advised but exciting love affair. The guest list is limited to a narrow universe – stars who have upcoming releases, or who are being fashioned into upcoming ‘properties’. There are no surprises, there is no variety. There is no space for fun, because all the space is taken up by sponsors—the show’s own version of botox. The Koffee hamper is bloated into excess. The rapid-fire round is clearly all too prepared and voting by an audience makes it safe and inoffensives. Janhavi Kapoor said she role-plays the rapid fire as a calming device. It has become Competition Success Review for filmi kids.

The games are childish (three words that begin with D? Am I D for Dreaming? Is this Khushi’s H for Homework?). 

 

The lie-o-metre has no place on the show, because the show, like so much else in our larger political culture, produces and reproduces single meaning characters. People are their curated social media selves, their PR selves. There are hymns to capitalism and monogamy, replacing the hosannas of hedonism. They reveal what has already been revealed. The young seem incapable of wit. Their clothes (barring Khushi Kapoor’s dress this season) are utterly blah, curated only to show their fitness levels, not to express personality. That is why Sharmila Tagore with her well-lived life and her utter self-confidence was a relief and interesting to listen to. But that much person-hood is as far as we are allowed to get, in case we get ideas of being persons in a different ‘hood than our own I guess. Yes, we could remark on a certain refreshing quality to Ananya Pandey, but it’s all very relative, isn’t it?

 

Nowhere was this more disappointing than in the finale episode where even women like Neetu Kapoor and Zeenat Aman seemed to be function as little more than their social media selves—much like Deepika and Ranbir in the opening episodes predictable and setting-teeth-on-edge performative liberalness (I was dating others being the sole moment of relief). They were disconnected from each other. Johar strove but failed to connect them. Zeenat Aman strained to break the boundaries, but except her revelation that ‘the ball is in your court Zeenie baby’ message had come from someone in the Kapoor family, which effectively punctured the family drama model, bringing back a smidge of the old frisson of subversion, the challenging of status quo by revealing uneasy truths, even she remained in a politically correct, if worthy, mode, close to her Instagram persona, but without its elan.  

 

All of this happens as there is ever more serious commentary on popular culture in critical media. But the serious commentary devotes the lion’s share of its energies, to giving alternative cred to that which is strongly mainstream as well, serving it to the extent that it now has little power to bring to importance something not as regular. That is why documentaries for instance will only be written about if they win Oscars. We do not go to the dozens of film sites to discover newness as such. We all drink at the main stream for the most, in some register or other.

 

The show’s homogeneity, this monoculture reveals how culture and politics mirror each other, not through content, but through form. It is in this way that media and culture habituate us with rasas and registers to expect more or less—in this case very little. Itna sara paisa mein itna hi milega. In a state of permanent dissatisfaction, we keep coming back for less. Our secret selves get no place to play. The affair has become a situationship. Once if I tried to watch Koffee with Karan while sending emails, it would always distract me from work. Now I distract myself from it as work-watching by playing Two Dots. If you complain you are told, you knew what you were getting into. Audiences return, but that does not mean much except numbers. If you wonder why hate is the stronger emotion, perhaps you should ask what you did to love?

 

 

And yet (oh thank God for and yets) at the heart of it all there is Karan Johar. In many ways he is the only interesting thing about the show, fitting in but not quite fitting in, constantly evoking memories of not-fitting in, which seem so much richer than any of the aspiration blah blah we have to sit through, speaking of his own emotion to give the audience something knowing full well his guests won’t.  In many ways the show is a kind of cultural autobiography of Karan Johar. Now older, he occasionally corrects un-reconstituted attitudes—Rohit Shetty’s casual homophobia, Neetu Singh’s carelessness about mental health. We gain some things, and forget to note what we are losing.

 

But I often wonder, whether I should press the lie-o-metre when Johar aches for K3G Koupledom or when he yearns for another more libidinal though mess and problematic past movie industry. The last remaining double-meaning of the show, he clings with wistful conviction only to a vanishing heterogeneity, which he has been complicity in vanishing, even if not willfully (maybe). If life were a movie, perhaps he might bring it back too. Who knows? Never say never, yaniki Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna.

 

 

 

 ON EARLIER SEASONS (Hard to find older columns so updating as I go)

What I Learned from Koffee with Karan Season 4

What I Learned from Koffee with Karan Season 5

Less Koffee More Intimacy - Season 7