Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa: First Look

At the urging of the Drift Memsaab, I tuned in to Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa, Sony India's adaptation of ABC's hugely popular Dancing with the Stars. And I must say, it was terrible enough to hold me fascinated for a while. Who knows maybe, I'll even watch it regularly.

Early on with some mounting amusement I noted how the real dancers were being paired up with people who thought they could dance but really were there just to put the Jhalak in the title.

There were some funny interviews of stars who tried to look humble and say "I can't dance". Of course, a pregnant pause followed where the expectation was for the other person to say "Nahin nahin, you will be great!" Much ego massaging and setup of expectations ensued.

Now I also noticed that the good looking people got paired with other good looking people. Which left the not so visually fortunate ones to pair up with the uglier ones. Come on now, you can hate me for saying this. But in your heart of hearts you know this to be true. Take that Ronit Roy - thanks for the skinny on all these TV stars, Mum! - and look who he ended up with. Now take a look at Mir Ranjan Negi's partner. You see my point?

All the pairings were made live on camera. Which means the individual units in each pair had no clue who they would end up with. This was a great idea on the part of the producers. Because no doubt the less popular of the pair (which would be the choreographers) probably spent all night dreaming of landing a primo star.

And then watching most of their faces fall when they saw their partner was pretty entertaining. Someone got paired with Mika Singh and looked distinctly like she wanted to choke herself. On meeting her partner, Mini Mathur had a half frozen smile on her face and looked as enthusiastic as a toddler at an opera.

And then after each pair was "introduced" to us via montages and commentary - came their first dance.

And by all that is Holy, it was awful across the board. Now the producers tried hard - they punched up the performances with fancy editing and tilted camera angles. But hey, its hard to dress up a rhino - its always going to look like one. When it came to poor Mir Ranjan Negi's turn, the producers simply put a series of snapshots of his "performance" on the screen. Boy, Negi must have really blown!