Garewal’s attempted-Bollywood makeover not only avoided Gaga’s most-shocking details, but also skipped over her passionate and vocal activism around queer issues and immigration. Getty Images
By Neelanjana Banerjee
When Lady Gaga made her Indian television debut last night on Simi Garewal’s show, it sounded like must-see TV. The grande dame meets the grandstanding rockstar — the sparks just had to fly. It had happened before. In Lady Gaga’s 2009 interview with the famous American journalist Barbara Walters, Lady Gaga surprised everyone by showing up for the interview in a Chanel suit and removing her sunglasses in what seemed like a gesture of respect to Walter, the elder stateswoman of American media. That didn’t stop Walters from coming at her with hot-button questions on rumours of Gaga’s hermaphroditism and bisexuality, which included asking her point blank: “Have you had sex with women?”
Grande dame-meets-grandstanding rock star can make for must-see TV, but sadly not with a coy Simi Garewal steering the show. The 25-year-old international pop sensation’s mainstream Indian television debut last night on India’s Most Desirable was, in one word, disappointing. The interview, part of a PR effort to promote her October tour of India, tried to present a more romantic, family-friendly Gaga, playing down her scantily-clad, sexually ambiguous, Fame Monster persona. A strategy that made for a tedious hour of banal chit-chat, interspersed with stock video footage.
The much-hyped interview lost most of its allure almost immediately when we realised Garewal and Gaga were not even in the same time zone, much less the same room. When we finally caught a glimpse of Gaga she was obscured under a black motorcycle cap, her signature overly-large sunglasses and a boxy, black jacket with her hands in fingerless leather gloves.
The only touch of color was a long swath of greenish-blonde hair that was arranged somewhat messily over her right shoulder. A look best described as Wicked Witch of the West meets Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Though it is likely the jacket stopped short of some kind of sequined g-string outside the camera frame, Gaga looked uncharacteristically covered up, and a bit rough when compared to Garewal’s elegant black and white 1940s-esque, floor-length suit dress. The difference in Garewal’s Bollywood glamour and what Gaga dubbed her “garage coutoure” made the interview seem like a meeting between the Queen of England and a polite Sid Vicious.
The sappy music and Simi’s teary eyes were sadly undermined by the unromantic montage of pictures of Carl’s mullet and Gaga’s pantless outfits. Getty Images
Garewal avoided any questions about Gaga’s androgynous and sexually fluid tendencies. Introducing her by her real name, Stefani Angelina Germanotta, Garewal talked about Gaga’s success and how the title song from her most recent album, “Born This Way,” has become “a mantra that applies to everyone, even me.”
While at least one third of the episode was performance footage and what seemed like previously shot video, Garewal’s real spin on Gaga came in the second half of the show, when the talk show host zeroed in on the pop star’s personal life.
An extra-long segment was dedicated to Lady Gaga’s on-again, off-again relationship with bartender and promoter Luc Carl, who is publishing this charming book next year about how to “lose weight while getting wasted”. With violins sawing away in the background, Garewal tried to turn Lady Gaga’s and Carl’s bad romance into something worthy of a Bollywood fairy tale. She couldn’t resist mentioning that the young lovers were even planning, at one point, to get married.
But the sappy music and Simi’s teary eyes were sadly undermined by the unromantic montage of pictures of Carl’s mullet and Gaga’s pantless outfits. The most romantic moment of the same being a close-up of Carl’s Twitter saying: “I miss you.”
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