Silver Anniversary Of A Marriage Made For TV

AMEER Nair, the programme head of Star TV back in 2000, recalls Amitabh Bachchan being his first and only choice to be the host of the Hindi version of the popular game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

- NAMRATA JOSHI

The franchise was being launched in India as Kaun Banega Lakhpati—till Star TV's owner at the time, Rupert Murdoch, decided to add two zeroes to the figure in a matter of "seven seconds", as Nair puts it.

Most thought it was a bad idea for a larger-than-life superstar of the big screen to constrict himself to the idiot box. That it might make him lose his aura. But 25 years later, on the show's last episode of the 16th season telecast on March 11, the 82-year-old exuberantly arrived at the sets to open the proceedings of "Gyaan ka rajat mahotsav" (silver anniversary of knowledge). His appeal is, evidently, far from diminished after all these.

"Amit ji brought gravitas to the show... The deep baritone, magnetic eyes, dramatic pauses and booming laugh—all added to the magical entertainment," sums up Nair. Add to it Bachchan's impeccable enunciation and literary disposition and you have an idol for the aspirational Indian middle class.

It has indeed been an extraordinarily enduring association between a show, its presenter and the audience, notwithstanding the ups and downs of the TRPs, the occasional criticism about stoking materialism and devolving over the years into a sentimental family saga, rather than the genuine test of knowledge that it originally started as.