The studio is the confession box, the radio listens to our dark secrets. As a reality show runs truth tests, a look at how the idea of privacy is changing in India
Purvashree Juvekar-D’souza, a 27-year-old manager at an MNC in Mumbai, says she has always been a rebel. Last month, she did something very unconventional indeed. She pushed her husband, Olwin D’souza, to participate in the reality show, Sach Ka Saamna, and put their marriage under the spotlight.

“Do you think of another woman during intimate moments with your wife?”, “Do you wish you had another woman as your wife?”, and “Would you sleep with another woman if you knew your wife wouldn’t find out?”, asked the show’s host Rajeev Khandelwal. Olwin answered ‘yes’ to all three, Purvashree smiled nervously.
Out of the studio, she brushes aside questions of propriety and wishes there was one question Olwin had been asked: ‘My husband has had many women friends. I know about his past. What I don’t know is whether he’s cheating on me. I’d love to know that,” she says.

The D’Souzas are not alone. On a swivelling chair, under encouraging bright lights, ordinary men and women (and some has-been celebrities) have confessed—to small foibles and dark desires, to stealing bed linen from hotels and cheating on wives. It is Freud’s couch of confessions, on national television. From July 16 (the day the show opened) till August 5, the show’s helpline received more than 13,000 calls from people wanting to participate in the show and 26,000 online enquiries, says Star Plus. As private life becomes public performance on the show, it challenges conventional notions of Indian privacy, our discomfort with discussing sex. It also seems like an idea whose time has come.

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