This week’s Bigg Boss Tamil began with quite a bit of drama. The contestants are warming up to each other, losing their inhibitions, and slowly revealing their true colours. While this is much-needed, as we, the audience, would like to see the contestants as they are and accordingly pick the deserving winner, there’s a lot that gets skewed for us. For starters, we end up watching contestants being driven up the walls and witness their worst form. They are manipulated into reacting a certain way and there are strategies devised by other contestants so as to increase conflicts with each other.

If last season the makers received flak for portraying mental illness as a task and reducing it to a joke, this season they try to bring out the worst by creating deliberate gender bias and doing nothing to remove it.

While we laud the women for calling out contestant Ponnambalam’s extremely crass and distasteful joke that he made in the presence of Aishwarya Dutta and Yashika Anand, it doesn’t help much when the tasks they’ve been assigned results in a massive battle of the sexes and gender bias.

The week’s captain is Nithya, a woman again and that’s terrific because women are just as capable as men. But the tasks? It’s all about serving the men and treating them like kings. The female contestants are made to dress up in a saree and clean, cook, wash, and fan and serve everything for the male contestants. And while we are aware it’s just a task, it should be divided and not just restricted for women alone. It’s as though the makers are banking on the sexism and stereotype that women are made for domestic chores. It’s demeaning, it’s insulting, and the whole set-up, all under the garb of a luxury budget task, needs to be called out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0F7l9hZu6LE

The male contestants will clearly take advantage of this and it has already happened. From instructing to clean the swimming pool to washing and drying clothes, even going to the point of removing t-shirts off their body, it’s sad that this is all that the makers could come up with and cash in on gender bias.

The show’s promos are out and it isn’t helping much since the task continues and the women are beginning to revolt. Yet we have male contestants insisting that the tasks must be done since it’s a game after all. Not cool, because would a male contestant do the same if he’s being told and instructed around when his privileges are taken away? Guess not.

Apart from that, estranged couple Balajie and Nithya continue to have rifts between them. Balajie taunts her while she tries to be as civil as possible. While they do need to rise above their hate, it’s bad enough that people continue to root for them even when they really don’t want to be with each other. At least she doesn’t. As of now, one needs to simply wait and watch what the future episodes have for the audience.