Simi Garewal has been quoted as saying that her new Star World show, Simi Selects India's Most Desirable will be much more "relaxed and informal" than its predecessor Rendezvous With Simi Garewal. Here, instead of talking about the time her guest's parents died, and asking them how it made them feel, Garewal interviews the guest's parents as well. Unlike Rendezvous, where she would spend the better part of the hour attempting to make her guests—primarily her contemporaries and occasionally their kids—cry, on IMD, her aim is to get younger views (hence the teenage in-studio audience) laugh. If the first episode was anything to go by, all Simi manages to do is make us cringe. In our weekly recaps of IMD then, we rate Simi and her B'wood buds on the cringe scale, with 10 being run-for-cover and 1 being safe-to-watch.
Simi is young at heart
As part of her attempt to appear more current, Garewal promised to add more colour to her wardrobe. Unfortunately, in Simi's world, the meaning of current seems to be dressing like a 1980s American soap star. Her shoulder-padded silver and black jacket-like dress looked like a relic from the set of Dynasty (Simi, Joan Collins called, she says you can keep it) while the matching skirt looked like it got caught in a shredder just before the show. Alas, despite her sprinkling the conversation with teen-speak like "Too cool, man!", both Kapoor and the studio audience were well aware that they were in the presence of seniority. Ranbir called her "Simiji" throughout while the college kids referred to her, respectfully, as "Ma'am" (had the Botox allowed for it, you would have seen her glower). After all, as Ranbir pointed out, his father Rishi Kapoor made his debut with Simi in Mera Naam Joker. What he neglected to mention is that Rishi Kapoor played a school kid crushing on his teacher, played by Garewal, in the 1970 film.
The one who shall not be named
Karan Johar has, on record, said that he has great respect for Simi (aunty), but we're not quite sure Garewal is entirely happy about the upstart stealing her talk show thunder these past few years. Even though a bulk of the Ranbir Kapoor episode referenced Kapoor's and his ex-girlfriend Deepika Padukone's appearances on Koffee With Karan, not once was the filmmaker or the title of his show named. "I think it all also started by this one episode on television, a talk show where Deepika and Sonam appeared, and they spoke about me," said Ranbir, when asked about media speculation regarding his personal life.
The Ranbir Kapoor matrimonial ad
"I'm 28 years old, I don't have a girlfriend," declared Kapoor early on in the show, indirectly rubbishing rumoured flings with co-stars Katrina Kaif and Nargis Fakhri. The post of the future Mrs. Kapoor is very much open seemed to be the core message of the episode, which attempted to do damage control after his Koffee With Karan appearance by countering his image as a Casanova with that of a soft-spoken wet blanket mama's boy. Ever so eloquently, Kapoor told the nation: "I want to be in love. I want to love one person. I want to make that person happy. I want to have a lovely life with that person." He's been in only three relationships, he said, and that in "the first relationship…it took me six months to even hold her hand". Kapoor chose not to reveal timelines to Garewal; though he was much more candid to men's magazine GQ back in 2008 when he admitted to losing his virginity at 15. But he may have lost all credibility as a man and an actor when he said, "I'm really shy. It's really hard for me to approach a woman. I start stammering, my knees start shaking…It's a personality problem. It's my introvert nature."
Exes can't be friends
We don't know if Ranbir Kapoor has been hanging out with Shah Rukh Khan but he seems to be getting pretty good at the art of saying he has no problems with anyone, and then spitting out exactly what he thinks of them. "I still respect Deepika a lot," said Kapoor. "I had a beautiful relationship with her. She has some angst against me. I think it would have been more graceful if she could pick up the phone and speak to me about it rather than speak on a public platform. She didn't do it." Clearly, all has not ended well with Kapoor and Katrina Kaif either. When Garewal as Kapoor's fictitious girlfriend Kiki (more on that later) asked him if he thought Kaif was hotter than her, he whispered, "She doesn't know how to dress."
There's nothing quite like your mum's gushing to bring down your sex appeal a notch, or three
Kapoor is self-admittedly a mama's boy but if there was ever any doubt that his mother, actress Neetu Kapoor worships the ground he walks on, they were swept aside on last night's episode. Everything about Ranbir is perfection personified, she'll have us know: he still "talks to his father with his eyes to the floor", he's "a very soft person", and he "has never hurt me, never gone against me". Since no matrimonial ad is quite complete with some parental contribution, she added, "I don't think Ranbir should change anything about himself. I call him Raymond–the complete man. He's sensitive, he's everything that a woman looks for in a man…It's very easy to fall in love with Ranbir." At one point, it got a bit much even for Kapoor who said he'd like to apologise for the gush-fest but that his fans need not discount everything she said. "My mother is really in love with me," he said. Somewhere, Donald Trump just felt vindicated.
Bollywood families should do their homework
You'd think this would not happen with pre-taped interviews, but every time Ranbir Kapoor said something about his romantic history, and Garewal posed the same question to his parents, we got a different answer (not that guest, host or studio audience seemed to notice). For instance, after Ranbir said that he has "brought girlfriends home with him", his mum said "he hasn't brought his girlfriends yet" while his dad said "he has brought a girlfriend home". Though Ranbir admitted to having been in three relationships, his mother claimed that he's had "just one girlfriend, Deepika". Now, call us old-fashioned but we think there's something distinctly uncool about the mother of a 28-year-old (with a reputation for being a philanderer) making her son out to be the paragon of virtue on national television. "Maybe there was something missing in their relationship, so he had to break it off," she said about the Ranbir-Deepika affair, adding later on that "Ranbir is too soft a person…He can't confront a girl…He can't hurt people. Nowadays, girls…they don't care." Hmm, we wonder which girl/s she was referring to?
The identity of Ranbir Kapoor's wife-to-be
It wasn't enough that his mum and Garewal had done everything they possibly could to let us know that any woman should be praying multiples times a day to be blessed with a man as good and kind as Ranbir, we had to get mystical acknowledgement of his virtuousness. In what looks like a regular feature of India's Most Desirable, Garewal roped in a tarot card reader to tell us what the future holds for her guest's love life. Kapoor has "not met the girl who he's going to marry", she "may or not be" from the film industry, and they will get hitched "two to two-and-a-half years from now" were what the cards foretold. Needless to say, the reader elicited a high-five from Kapoor when she said he's "a committed sort of person contrary to your image".
Kiki, kookoo
We were prepared for Simi Garewal to be at her simpering worst. We were expecting the spaceship-like all-white set. We were also pretty sure that we wouldn't see the ageless wonder's wrinkle-free face betray any trace of emotion irrespective of whether she was attempting to convey sympathy or shock. But nothing, no nothing could have (to borrow a word from Kapoor) "pre-warned" us about Kiki—the baby-voiced alter ego of sixty-something (if you believe Wikipedia) Garewal. When Garewal decided to take on the persona of an annoying fictitious girlfriend "who asks 'duh' questions"—as part of a Q&A round called "The Minefield"—she, for some inexplicable reason, decided to give the (presumably) 20-something woman the voice of a five-year-old. The result was perhaps the creepiest 10 minutes seen on Indian television in years. When the sexagenarian pouted her lips and said to Ranbir, "Darling, if you love me, tattoo my name, na?" (another barb at ex Deepika who incidentally appears on the next episode), for that moment, we felt just like Simi. We couldn't laugh, we couldn't even wince, we found ourselves rendered immobile, much like Garewal's face itself.
CRINGE FACTOR
Simi Garewal: 9/10
Neetu Kapoor: 9/10
Ranbir Kapoor: 8/10
6