Mid-day

• Admits she was paid to ‘play the bitch’ on Bigg Boss

Mumbai, Nov 13: Reality television may never be the same again. Especially after Kashmera Shah’s recent confessions to Showtime magazine (which hits stands today) insinuating that everything you saw on Sony’s reality show Bigg Boss was rehearsed and planned. 

For the first time ever, a contestant on the show has gone on record to admit that the makers had given each contestant a proper character brief and asked them to stick to it.

Kashmera says she did it all because she was in need of the money at that time. 

Says she, “I may have been a bitch in Bigg Boss, but I was just trying to do my job. That was the brief given to me; that I had to go in and destroy everything. I had to make everybody cry. That was the character I was playing from the beginning. It was a kind of a character sketch given to everyone. Whenever we did something out of character, they wouldn’t show it.”

In her shocking disclosures, Kash insists, “Everyone was given a kind of a brief. Rakhi was the comedian, Anupama Varma was the girl-next-door, Aryan Vaid was the stud, Rupali Ganguly was the crybaby while I was the bitch. We obviously weren’t allowed to speak about it…”

Kashmera maintains that she didn’t really like what she was doing but had no choice because of her bad financial condition. “I know people were wondering why I was behaving like that. But that’s what I was paid for. I went so many times in that confession room and cried. It’s so bad to play the vamp in real life. It destroys you completely as a person. People have to understand now that at that time I had no money and no career.” 

She also adds, “They would never show me helping people or cleaning up the house. They made me out to be too intelligent, which I’m not. There was so much going on in my life at that time, it’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself. When I came out, I got a shock that they had painted me to be such a bad person.”

The remuneration she got from Bigg Boss helped Kashmera clear her loans. “But it did not help me later on,” she says. “Because I felt I didn’t need to sell out. I went on that show to make a comeback; that’s why it felt so bad to play a character that I was not.”

Rajesh Kamat, MD Endemol, who was responsible for the first season of Bigg Boss, refutes Kashmera’s allegations, “This isn’t true at all. There is no scripting or any brief given to the contestants on the show. It’s a reality show where everything is captured on camera. I don’t know why Kashmera is saying all this now.”