Saris over sarongs

Aspiration beats titillation. The best kept secret in television is out. When faced with a choice between convention and crudity, TV audiences will always opt for family fun. It's not only because 90 per cent of India's 134 million TV households have one TV and TV-watching is still a collective experience in India. It's because when faced with the option of listening to a story and watching an item number, we would rather be engaged than amused. So it comes as no surprise that Kaun Banega Crorepati has done consistently better on Sony at an average TAM rating of 4.02 than Bigg Boss on Colors with an average rating of 3.12 and way better than Imagine TV's Rakhi ka Insaf at 1.49.

Why would people prefer to be tested rather than teased? Yes, some of it is because the man testing them is Amitabh Bachchan, who is reassuringly erudite and effortlessly effusive. Who looks as if he knows the answer to every question he is asking. And who receives poetic flourishes as well as he delivers them. But a lot of it is also the transformative quality of the show that can take Rahat Taslim, a miner's wife from Jharkhand who runs a stitching centre, from just another struggling mom to an instant celebrity.