It is probably a unique narrative campaign, the gradual carving of the living embodiment of a show that eventually also became the currency it would be measured against. He, however, crafted this saintly but aggressive persona that appealed to those propelled by chaos, and to those driven by discipline. Singha became a Roadie when no one really understood what being a Roadie meant.
But while the appeal of the show itself is a case study in agency and aspiration, no other man embodied its cosmetic ethos more than Singha, and the myth that followed him everywhere he went.Īmong the foul-mouthed, loose cannons Raghu Ram, and later Rajiv Lakshman, Singha assumed the gainful position of the sage, the man who commanded a kind of vague respect that was evidently a function of the show’s own marketing techniques. Such was the popularity of the show at a time, we watched classmates run away from college to give interviews, kids forge proofs of age to qualify just to stand in line for an audition. There is no denying the voyeuristic pleasures of the bald men and their apprentice Singha going at it hammer and tongs, as if stuck inside an icy cubicle falling through space, its air being sucked out by the second.
Maybe also because it stood for the one thing that I could only admire from a distance – the verbal violence that unfortunately also became its identity. I will be honest, I loved Roadies in its formative years when it was about athleticism and gnarly competitiveness. And no one man embodied this curious juggernaut of adolescent obsession more than the man who was also the first winner of the show – Rannvijay Singha. Small-town kids have this pent up energy and restraint waiting to unspool into the open landscapes of freedom that the cities offer, and Roadies became this imprecise but significant moment in the country’s coming-of-age story that though toxic at times, also represented the aspiration of those never handed an olive branch. As young teenagers, we gravitated to the global, more risqué sensibilities that suddenly began to feed into the idea of a counter-culture. Television still ruled the roost in terms of advertising and framing of culture back then, but the previous stronghold of Bollywood had begun to somewhat weaken with arrival of edgy content and channels like MTV and Channel V. Because small towns essentially behave like joint families, her solitary appearance in an episode made her more popular in town than any other accomplishment, academic or otherwise, ever could have. Back in 2007, a school dropout from my batch became talk of the town after she appeared on the iconic and messy interview round of the cult TV show MTV Roadies.
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