I Want My Rahul Refund!

After having accomplished not much in life except overdose on drugs, have a failed marriage and show up on reality TV with equally untalented attention-seekers, Rahul Mahajan thinks he can hit the marriage jackpot and get wooed by a line-up of brides.

Rakhi Sawant, whose pseudo-swayamvar Rahul is trying to replicate, can at least dance. She has a spunky coarseness that’s real underneath all her network nakhras. She would make a lousy wife and mother, but she’s at least a wannabe with some talent, even though it’s had some help from a plastic surgeon.

What has Rahul got? He’s no arm candy. And even women with extremely poor judgement – the kind that would have them line up for someone like Rahul M -- would admit that in a moment of crisis, an airline vomit bag would be a more dependable source of comfort than him.

He’s out of shape and dissipated. With that soft chin, the shifty eyes and hands that haven’t done much work other than leave bruises on his former wife, he’s a sorry specimen to parade in the marriage market. Would anyone buy a used car from him, let alone marry him?

And yet there he is, the next candidate for an on-air pseudo-shaadi. Couldn’t he at least work on his abs or get a tummy tuck before bothering to be photographed in his groom’s sherwani looking like schlub who’s just ended a first trimester of boozing?

I can understand Rahul’s desperation. He may not get luckier than this in his search for a mate. What I can’t understand is that there might actually be a queue of women so lacking in self-esteem that they are willing to concede to the public shame of actually declaring they want to marry this loser.

Surely they would rather be at home plucking their nose hair, sorting their socks or getting an honestly detoxing enema, than kissing Rahul’s ass for all the world to see?

Here I am, a happily married woman, getting bent out of shape on behalf of all these debased single women whose 15 minutes of fame are likely to prove longer than the length of time the unluckiest of them is likely to be married (or engaged) to this schmuck. (Aah, have been wanting to use this word in print forever and finally got the chance. A schmuck is Yiddish slang for the discarded foreskin of a circumcised penis. Another first for me: using 2 Yiddish words in the same piece of writing.)

The women on that show should demand a Rahul refund. “We want Rahul Gandhi,” they should shout to the network. Okay, that Rahul’s hard to get, but he’s got the looks and the substance that would easily make him part of any smart woman’s fantasies. If not him, how about a Rahul Gandhi look-alike? Or just any achha-sa, reasonably intelligent guy who might be trolling through the trenches of shaadi.com, without the luck to be as well-connected as Rahul M?

There’s no justice on TV. Network new programs, those purveyors of truth and balance, routinely feature ugly, old male anchors with powder-caked receding hairlines paired with bright, chirpy young women. Because according to their wisdom, women always have to look pretty, while bald, ugly men exude a natural air of irresistible competence.

This is an ass-umption made by bald, ugly, male network executives … the same sort who also fancy Rahul Mahajan would be God’s gift to women. And not inappropriately, this network’s name happens to be NDTV Imagine.