While the debate on kids participating and working on Television shows had been going on for quite some time now, it was director Shoojit Sarkar who created a stir once again when he tweeted an open request urging for a ban on all reality shows involving children.
And now Taare Zameen Par director Amol Gupte has opened a can of worms and revealed the dark secrets of kids’ reality shows and the tough conditions these child actors and reality TV show participants work under.
In an article to popular Mumbai newspaper DNA, Gupte says that he has been talking about the issue from a very long time now.
“I’ve been crying myself hoarse on the issue of children being forced to participate in reality shows for years. But to simply blame parents’ ambitions for this cruel and inhuman practice is absurd. Parents, who pressurise their children to excel on reality shows, are as much victims of a system that fosters and encourages unrealistic ambitions, as the other perpetrators of this criminal treatment of children,” he said.
Gupte further reveals the tough working conditions that these kids face.
“They are brought from distant towns to Mumbai and huddled into cheap hotels with their parents. Every morning, they have to travel to the TV studio for rehearsals. These kids are wrenched away from all normal activities and are thrown into a single-minded devotion to lending their voices to these reality shows. They are made to shoot for countless hours, sometimes in humid non-airconditioned rooms. It’s barbaric,” he said.
Known for his path-breaking films such as Stanley Ka Dabba, Gupte also pointed out a real-life event that happened on the sets of a singing reality show.
“A little, blind boy had made it to the finals of a singing contest. Throughout the day he was rehearsing under gruelling circumstances for his song and finally at 1 am when he was to record, he lost his voice. The child was traumatised for life,” he says.
When kids are evicted they are shattered and it affects their morale.
“They are shattered. They don’t know how to process the defeat into optimism. They feel as though they’ve fallen into a deep dark hole.”
[Image courtesy: Bollyspice.com]
Amole says he treats the children’s shooting as a workshop. “The kids shoot when they want to. There is no pressure on them. I’ve seen what happens to these children during long hours of shooting. Once a two-year-old child was shooting a Maggi noodles ad which I was directing. It was late in the night and the shooting was halted because the child was asleep. I saw the mother hissing and prodding the child to wake up. I went up to the mother and told her to please stop, that we will hold the shooting until the child is ready, even cancel it.”
The need of the hour
Gupte makes the following valid points that need to be pondered on.
“The government needs to enforce laws against children being made to work long hours. When I was the chairperson of the Children’s Film Society, I pushed for a law preventing children from being made to shoot for more than five and a half hours. That law is now existent. The law says children cannot shoot for more than five and a half hours for TV serials or films. But how many people follow this law? More needs to be done to ensure they are comfortable,” he signs off.
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