Gentleman's code: Bollywood, testosterone, and a lots of yawns

“You work, you earn. You marry, you burn.” No, that’s not a ditty by Kapil Sibal. It’s the opening line of the Chivas Studio Gentleman’s Code. Television’s answer to Esquire magazine and Playboy rolled into one. Or so I hoped. After all, this was a programme by Chivas, so style and slickness should have followed. This is what followed instead: The show is hosted by Aatish Taseer, following in the footsteps of Chetan Bhagat who also made his TV debut last week hosting 7 RCR on ABP News. The write-up of the programme on the Star World website says that “Chivas Studio Gentleman’s Code decodes the perceptions about the INDIAN MAN!” (the capital letters are theirs, not mine). Going by the promo, which featured my dishy friend Suresh Venkat, I must say I held out relatively high hopes for the programme. [caption id=“attachment_1347913” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A screengrab from YouTube of the Priyanka Chopra segment[/caption] The episode is broken up into separate segments. And begins with Taseer saying that “voyage” is a big word. That should have warned me about what was to come my way. The average or above average man over here is represented by Karan Johar, multi-millionaire film director to the stars. He’s not the only star in the programme, though. At one point there were so many celebrities, I started feeling that these were all the rejects from Koffee With Karan packed into one show. The segment which KJo features in, is the first one on Mothers and Sons. I understand that KJo is Star World’s ghar ka murgha, but they could have made an effort and got another star. Maybe Sanjay Bhansali speaking on his almost Norman Bates-like love for his mother, Leela which has made him include her name in his. What we got instead was KJo and some sparkling insights into his life and mind from him. There he was, sitting in his over-sized suit revealing that he used to cry every time his mother left the house. Which is a little worrying. “There’s a lot of angst, anger sometimes, outbursts.” He did salvage the hysteria by stating that men disrespect women because of their mothers and how their mothers speak about any and every woman in their son’s lives. He also showed us that he and Ekta Kapoor are the same person, by saying that mothers don’t want their sons to marry because they don’t want to “share their son or their jewellery”. And no, he wasn’t joking. The segments are interspersed with Taseer spouting some sentences in a faux British accent, while dressed as Shah Rukh Khan from Main Hoo Na including the scarf and slo-mo walk towards the camera while emerging from the mist. Any second you expect him to extend his arms and burst into song. His channelling of SRK was almost understandable, when you realise that the second longest spot on the programme was on Priyanka Chopra. Piggy Chops was in the segment on Men And Changing Women and was purportedly on a date with Taseer. A date on which they both ate nothing and didn’t take a sip from their tall glasses of what seemed to be lemonade. I thought there’d be some flirtatious banter, some charm offensive by Taseer, but what we got was a bunch of Miss Indian pageant answers mixed liberally with some regressive views. Piggy Chops’ view of the Indian guy is “handsome, dark and relatively tall”. What she loves about Indian men is “the incredible ability to have a certain ownership in a relationship”. She likes men who’ve given her “the ability to blossom” and thinks it’s very important for a guy to be possessive. You see, in her own words, she’s old-fashioned. I think she meant regressive. She also said that her father taught her that women should “be steeped in culture, but not confined by it”. They should “be strong, but gentle”. Father fixation and daddy issues being discussed by Taseer and Chopra was a bit surreal, to put it mildly. Taseer then said that he wanted to know whether “a poor writer stands a chance” with her. Which would have been flirtatious and cute, if it wasn’t for the fact that Taseer isn’t poor from any angle. I might have got some of the quotes slightly garbled going by the fact that I had to decipher two accents – faux British and faux Pitbull. The segment also had Chetan Bhagat smiling ethereally into the camera and reading from his book 2 States. His words which I have often tried to forget, were superimposed on his face. There was no escaping them. Who knew Chetan Bhagat was a love guru? There were many gems such as - “They don’t know their psychology, they don’t know their motivations, I don’t know my grammar.” Okay, I made up the last part. By now I’d started wilting. The last segment which I felt should have been the most important – Men & Sex, was just 4 minutes, 33 seconds long. Unless of course, the duration was supposed to be a subtle comment on men and sex. Going by the show’s propensity for stars, I thought they’d interview Sunny Leone or maybe even Mallika Sherawat. But instead we got an andrologist and Che Kurrien, the editor of GQ India. What was worse than the blah-ness of this segment was the visuals. This was a throwback to our college audio-visuals and Doordarshan. There were blurred shots of naked mannequins in horizontal positions. And swans made out of towels facing each other. Behind which were videos of men shaving and running. There were visuals of a woman and man holding hands and then laying their accessories on a night table and silhouettes of them doing what I think was supposed to mean they were making the beast with two backs. The day was saved by Taseer looking intensely into the camera and telling us he’ll be back next time with a show focused on Men At Work. I have to admit that the best part about this programme is Aatish Taseer. Thankfully he didn’t start reading from The Temple-Goers. Will next time’s episode also look like Bollywood spat up its refuse all over the show’s casting director’s diary? If you’re made of sterner stuff than me, tune into the show and do let me know. You can watch Gentleman’s Code every Sunday at 8pm on Star World. Disclaimer: Firstpost is owned by Network 18 that also owns television channels that directly compete with Star World.