Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) - Crusade for upliftment of the masses or deplorable gambling?

Lust and greed together with ego and anger are the prime movers of each individual. Take them away and much of the sound and fury surrounding the life's idiotic tale will cease. In fact these movers are so powerful that the society has to regulate them through various mechanisms to ensure that they are channelized productively and the pace of activities does not heat up beyond control.


Marketeers have exploited the tremendous power of these motives for commercial gains. If you want to sell something create an association between it and, say, sex. Catch hold of a model with sex appeal and associate that appeal with your product whatever it is and howsoever useless it is. Lo and behold. Buyers, well, the majority of them, mindlessly rush to acquire it as the money in their pockets flows to the seller. This has gained reluctant approval of the society. Though occasional noises are made about obscenity in advertising, these are accommodated by the system. So use of sex appeal as a tool of advertising, whether appropriate to the product or not, is not considered illegal. Of course, selling sex itself whether in the form of pornography or flesh trade is considered taboo or illegal in most societies for reasons stated at the beginning.

Greed too, like sex, has been used to oil the wheels of commerce. While the object of sex is a living being that of greed are normally money and inanimate objects. So how do you associate greed with a product? We all know the mechanism too well. Provide the buyer with a chance to get something additional while paying only for the product (ignoring the component loaded to finance the prizes.) So at the time of purchase he is given a scratch card or a chance to participate in a draw of lots. The prize(s) may be out of all proportions to the cost of the product being sold. You may be buying a bar of soap and getting a chance to win a holiday abroad that would otherwise cost you a couple of lakhs! Or you could get a chance of getting your toothpaste's weight in gold.

The moot question is whether or not does this practice of exploiting greed for promoting sales amount to gambling? In my opinion it does and I find it surprising that governments, even those that have banned gambling raise no objections to such practices. Possibly the argument is the same as in the case of sex (appeal): You can use it to promote sales of a product but you cannot sell it by itself. So while lottery may be banned, a scratch card with a product or even a draw of lots for genuine buyers is okay. Though farcical attempts are made to further disguise this, howsoever thinly, as a test of skill rather than chance. So you may be asked to write a slogan or answer a silly question for entering the draw of lots. The whole point is that though gambling as an appendage to a genuine commercial transaction may be grudgingly allowed, it is not okay by itself and in itself.

In these days of technology enablement, new formats and tools for gambling have emerged. SMS based contests are foremost amongst these. In these contests you are required to answer a silly question, pay inflated charges for an SMS and then a winner is decided by draw of lots.  Draw of lots because one hundred percent of the contestants are going to give the correct answers. Unlike the case stated in the preceding paragraph, there is no sale transaction associated with it. I do not think anybody subscribes to an argument that this is a test of skill and not a lottery. The questions are normally such that even the most retarded inmate of a lunatic asylum would answer it without a thought. And even if it is not, you have all the time to do your research on the net. This new variant of lottery business is made all the more lucrative by the fact that technology has substantially slashed costs of printing and distributing tickets. Technology has done away with distribution of physical paper tickets and collection of subscriptions and replaced them with your telephone number and SMS charges that you pay. It is surprising that no government has even thought of banning this form of gambling. Even the states where gambling is totally banned have failed to recognize these contests as such.


Gambling in any form including that through SMS contests is habit forming like a drug. You feel an initial euphoria after subscribing to the game. This euphoria is later replaced by dejection and severe depression for all the millions of contestants except a few very lucky ones. So they go for another dose. The cycle keeps repeating and the addicts lose their hard earned money and peace of mind. This also creates a moral hazard where people expect a fortune in return for nothing more than a chance and a small payment.


With this background in place, I wish to make an assertion that the currently popular TV programme, KBC is just a variant of the online gambling discussed above with a vast group of active spectators added to it. Of course, the format is cleverly modified and designed to disguise its true nature and make it as interesting for the viewers of the show as the participants. Another advantage of the modified format is that it further reduces the chances of the lucky participants winning a bigger prize higher up in the ladder of questions. This is partly done by making the questions progressively more and more useless and less and less relevant to our day-to-day affairs.  Needless to reiterate that the lucky participants in the actual game are chosen through plain gamble or lottery mechanism. Of course a few may be chosen on the basis of their top-dog or under-dog status to add further spice to the show for the viewers and further disguise it as very different from gambling. The top-dogs add one more veil to this gambling venture to make it look like a charitable one.


I hope that you have carefully listened to the ramblings of participants who made it to the show. They tell you like a typical addict the efforts that they have put over a decade or so and thousands of rupees that they have spent on their phone bills. And there are millions like them who spent thousands but couldn't make it. And naturally so because it is after all a game of gambling.  The viewers too contribute to the gambling kitty by answering one silly question per day.

It is truly pathetic and deplorable that a person of the stature of Amitabh Bachchan is made to proclaim this program as a laudable crusade for the upliftment of the downtrodden masses though it is merely a sugar coated and glamorized version of gambling.

We can all be sure that a person of Mr. Bachchan's standing must be able to see through the whole gimmick but he carries out his brief as a true professional and leaves questions of ethics to his principals.

As in any business of lottery it is the organizers, and in this case the host too, that become multi-crorepatis. The hapless participants await the next season with clenched fists and a distracted mind.


Are you convinced?  Will you call an axe an axe?