New Reality Show On NDTV Imagine
Raaz Pichle Janam Kaa is NDTV Imagine’s newest reality TV. Based on past-life therapy, the show has therapist-psychologist Dr. Trupti Jain taking patients to their past lives through a session of hypnosis on the couch. So you have a homemaker, who feared flying, discovering she had died as a sailor in a plane crash near Geneva! Interestingly, the same plane had carried Dr. Homi Bhabha and the year was 1966.
Then there was another guy who feared crowds. It came into light that he was actually a man born in a lower caste family, shunned by the other caste villagers, and who was beaten up and killed brutally for stealing. And last but not the least, there was Shekhar Suman on the couch wanting to meet his son, Aayush who had died at a very tender age. Suman met him as he travelled back in time, 1873 to be precise. He discovered he was a soldier, called Frederick, born in Scotland.
His wife Maria, who Suman claimed had “the eyes of my present wife, Alka,” had died along with his parents and son, Vincent in a fire. Suman had not been able to save them and had later committed suicide by jumping off a balcony. Uncannily, all the three participants claimed to have had something that had happened in their last birth finding resonance in their present life. So there was Suman who claimed that Aayush was scared of bursting crackers, possibly because he had died in a fire or that even today when the actor stands in the balcony of his house he gets an eerie feeling of jumping or falling down to death!
The problem with the show is you will either surrender yourself to everything that’s happening there, believing every word the participant utters and every scene that unfolds (the incidents have been dramatically recreated through sepia tinted flashbacks) or you will just smirk and dismiss it as rubbish, hogwash. Unfortunately, we have still not been able to accept it whole heartedly. Because, one it’s a little difficult to believe that a therapist can take you back in time, touch a particular incident that had happened and relate it to something from your present. Secondly, Dr Jain’s way of going about it, the way she speaks to the participants, especially when she tells them ‘Ab aap us cheez ko mehsus karenge’ or ‘Ab aap us cheez ko phir se dekhenge…paanch, char, teen, do, ek’ it sounds very funny…as if she can make the participant go back in time just like that, with a snap of her fingers! May be till we actually do it (and we don’t want to do it) it’s really difficult to gauge if all that transpires is reality or make-believe. Worse, you don’t feel shaken or stirred. Much as you would like to be awed by the goings-on, you feel the pull of your remote control to watch something else. Maybe, because the entire exercise looks very clinical, very synthetic.
Last but not the least, Ravi Kishan as the host, is a total misfit. His dilated pupils and exaggerated, animated lines fail to impress you. He reminds you of those seedy, pony-tailed, bearded news anchors who do stories of mumbo jumbo on some C-grade Hindi channel! He keeps hammering ‘raaz’ and ‘pichle janam’ to the point that you want to jump into your TV set and make him a thing of the past. Raaz…whatever doesn’t even entertain or engage you. Period.
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