Ah, Shilpa...

Well, Shilpa Shetty is having her few moments of fame. I don't blame her, really -- I just hope she enjoys every moment of it. I also hope it gets her better acting assignments -- because she's sadly under-used.

Still I can't resist putting quoting this excerpt from Germaine Greer, the first few paragraphs of her wickedly funny essay.

There are no good reasons for watching Celebrity Big Brother and very good reasons for not. Not watching will spare you the nerve-fraying annoyingness that is Shilpa Shetty. Everything about her is infuriating: her haughty way of stalking about, her indomitable self-confidence, her chandelier earrings, her leaping eyebrows, her mirthless smile, her putty nose and her eternal bray, "Why does everyone hate me?" Not to mention the crying jags. What no one seems to have quite understood is that Shilpa is a very good actress. Everyone hates her because she wants them to. She also knows that if she infuriates people enough, their innate racism will spew forth.

As a Tamil, Shetty has certainly had to deal with discrimination at home in suburban Mumbai. Her only motive for parading in front of the other women in the house with whitener on her face was to show what utter hicks they are, how little they understand of her complex reality or of a billion people in the subcontinent who all want to have wheat-coloured skin. I bet thousands of brown-skinned girls in Southall fell off the sofa laughing when she did that.

Bollywood is no picnic; anyone who makes 51 Bollywood movies in 13 years has to be tough. Shilpa has a black belt in karate. She is just the girl to raise the pit bull in a dizzy little drip like Danielle and keep her frothing at the mouth long enough for her nascent career as a sweet little Wag to disappear down the drain. When Shilpa is finished with Danielle even Teddy Sheringham will know what a small, dark heart beats within her fetching chest. This explains the slightly cannibal air of self-satisfaction that never abandons Shilpa. She knows what she is doing. She will shred the nerves of all the other women in that house until even Cleo pulls back her frozen lips and shows the fangs behind her witless Mona Lisa smile.

I can switch Shilpa off. The people in the house with her haven't got that option. The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the ass Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her. So Danielle, beside herself with rage because Shilpa cooks with onions, calls her a dog. Jack Tweed calls her a cunt. The word was bleeped out, leading many viewers to speculate that she had been racially abused. That is not surprising. This is a racist country; to the vast majority of couch potatoes out there, Shilpa is a "Paki bird".