Lux Perfect Bride: How to turn Marriage a farce?

Lux Perfect Bride is a new reality TV show and it is being broadcast in Star Plus TV Channel. The idea is very simple- find a bride for a boy. The would be groom and his mother will select from a number of girls their would be wife and daughter in law. Star Plus is giving a lot of publicity to this reality show and they think that it will become very popular in India. I am not an Indian person but reality it came to me as a sick idea. About the format of the show, I am giving from the website of the TV channel:

The show will have five well-educated prospective grooms and their mothers choose brides from 10 girls (over the age of 18).

Every day, the girls will have to finish tasks given to them; they will have to live for a certain number of days with the groom’s mothers, who will observe them and decide who is the best in that week. The audience will also get a chance to vote for the girl they like and that girl will be exempted from elimination. The mothers decide who is eliminated each week.

On the other hand, the boys will also be assigned different tasks and have to live together in one place, where cameras observe them 24x7. They have to finish their tasks successfully and the girls will get a chance to eliminate them.

Ultimately, one girl will be finalised as a suitable bride and if she wishes to marry a particular person then, they can get married. Three mentors – Malaika Arora Khan, Shekhar Suman and Amrita Rao – will guide the contestants and the mothers. All the contestants have been chosen via matrimonial sites and the winners will get prize money of Rs 25 lakh. The hour-long show will air Monday to Friday at 10.30pm and on Saturday and Sunday at 10pm.

Marriage is supposed to be a sacred thing in India. In the last few months, there has been some kind of buzz about wife swapping in India and now, this lux perfect bride. I find both of them equally distasteful. Of course, perfect bride is based on a foreign reality show and this is the thing that I do not like. Star Plus wants to cash in on the emotion of Indian people about marriage. They are not doing anything to fight against the abuse and violence against women. Instead, they are promoting the idea that the groom’s mother is an important person in the marriage. Well, to be honest with you, often many girls get tortured by the husband’s mother and this reality show is only glorifying the power and authority of husband’s mother. I could not find anything about the presence of the girls’ mothers. Perhaps she has nothing to say about selecting her would be son in law.

In the end, I find this program (Lux Perfect Bride) degrading to women. Well, it is the viewers who are to be blamed. If they did not watch this kind of programs then they would not have made in the first place.