Big Brother is Fake!

Big brother is supposed to be a reality show, staged in a large comfortable house, furnished with Jacuzzi, Steam bath, large furniture, running water, enough food, alcohol, VIP suite, other luxuries and lots of surveillance cameras to monitor every single movement made by the housemates. Currently ranked as the number one ‘reality show’ in Africa, Big Brother is premised on a group of people who have been handpicked from various African Countries after series of auditions, to mingle and foster relationships in a house where they are isolated and barred from having any interaction whatsoever with the outside world.

The show which runs for almost three months features mostly housemates who are upbeat about fame and how to make it in life by scheming all kind of strategies and plots to outwit each other for the grand prize. Whilst the real objective of the reality show is yet to be known, speculation holds that, it serves as a platform to watch people closely through the lenses of Big Brother’s all-seeing-eye as housemates live their lives.

Apart from the fact that it is a game and sometimes entertaining, most people are wondering what’s in for them since all the fun starts and ends there in the marooned house. Undisputedly, the game if played well, presents a platform for some of the housemates to sell their brands in all African homes and abroad, whiles, some are about finding love by taking their chances. Others are about the fame while some are purposely there for the grand prize which reminds us of choices and preferences.

However, my motivation to write this piece is to dispute the fact that BIG BROTHER is a reality show because whereas the ‘show’ holds true, same cannot be said about the ‘reality’. You don’t congregate a bunch of young men and women in a house and dictate how they should live by telling them what they should do at appreciable time intervals and still call it reality.

Big Brother practically tells them what to wear, where to go and sometimes, what to eat. It tells them when to engage in a task or bath whilst showing their nudity to anyone who cares to watch and I don’t see how these constitute being real with one’s self. 

Reality show is what you see when you enter Makola and Ikeja markets in Ghana and Nigeria respectively. It is what you see when you observe from the corner of the road and see people struggling and shoving each other just to board vehicles that will convey them to their places of work while the snake of private cars honk all through the traffic jam to work.

Reality is waking up in the morning and planning what to do or how to add value to one’s self, not just gossip, chit-chat about everything and anything or saunter around a demarcated perimeter to which anything contrary attracts a stroke and probably sends you packing home. 

I understand people are really living very luxurious lives where they just relax at home and watch the globe turn around without a tinge of a worry about how to feed, but it is different when you camp a group of people with an objective, by feeding, clothing and offering them almost anything basic a person requires to live a healthy and a clean life should at most be a ‘live show’ but not a reality show because we watch live football matches every time but do not refer to them as reality shows.

Fool's Paradise

Trying to demystify why ‘fools fall in love” is one of the endless pursuit a man can indulge himself in, which begs the question, why amorous love has so many negative inferences and connotations, among which are “love is blind”,  “at the touch of love, every man becomes a poet”, “love is not for the faint-hearted".

This makes me wonder if the supposed wise people do not have emotions that are aroused by the attractiveness of the opposite sex and the need to copulate or perhaps, they have a way of going about it, which does not have effect on their senses, because it looks like the more I do, the more I get lost and at this point, I can only rescind my fate and choose between being a fool or a wise person.

Sometimes, the import of all these negative inferences makes meaning when you look at it from a different perspective, which makes you smile and nod your head to these age old truisms as a form of approval. 

A fool according to an unknown source can be someone who lacks commonsense and intelligence and mostly, it is what we display any time love comes knocking on our door. It is very easy to appear a fool or actually do relatively foolish things for the one you love and in worse cases, defy all beliefs which hitherto were sacred to you, just to please that one special person.

Being a fool in the context of love is not necessarily acting up in the circus or has nothing to do with comedy. What it simply means is to be thinking with your heart which is sometimes referred to as following one’s heart.

The head is physical and logical and tries to put things in its right perspective according to the bearer’s level of intelligence and expectations while the heart is illogical and can only be felt. The heart does not think and cannot think. It doesn’t know what is right or not and does not conform to norms. All it exudes is emotions and lots of it. 

How often have you not been lost at sea when asked to explain why you love the one in your life?

Have often have you not rationalized why the one you are with is the best thing that has ever happened to you even though you know parts or the whole of your explanation is false?

How about the lies you discovered s/he told you and still you found a way to make her/him stay with that big heart of yours, not to talk about the physical abuse?

How often have you not asked friends and family to mind their own businesses because it’s your life and you could choose whom to love against all odds?

So, why did you lie to your friends and Employer about the bruises and scars s/he left on your skin if you were actually in your senses and thinking right?

Can these aforementioned and a lot more rhetoric of this nature be considered as someone in their right senses?

Unfortunately, the mind and heart fails to coordinate when an issue of love arises and each in its own right chooses a different path. It is also convenient to state that no one in his right senses can love because loving is for fools who suppresses or discard some of their right thoughts just to be with the one they meant to be with.

The head with a fanciful brain, sits up in its quietude to prepare a checklist as to who should own its heart but the heart just chances upon someone and tasks the fellow to own its head, thus betraying the head-heart relationship. The heart does not mind any other stimuli apart from what it perceives and further blinds its eye to all the reasoning his mind and that of others will give it. It is the heart that beats at the sight of our captors, and it is the heart that breaks when that person does something awful against us or exits out of our life.

Furthermore, love is one thing no one has monopoly over and can barely control, unless they retreat from that pursuit, because it reins everyone in and makes them fools at one point or the other and I am sure you can readily attest to letting go of some ideals and terribly compromising on some commonsense, just to ensure that something was done right.

Additionally, knowing that love relationship is a paradise for fools, can make most of us relax and make things work by not being rigid and too logical because love in itself does not make sense and you can bear out to my assertion if you probably have asked yourself once or twice in the past, why some people end up as couples whom in your opinion do not belong at all and the most familiar one by asking yourself, why you ever dated that Ex of yours.

Finally, it is prudent to follow your heart and make a fool of yourself by falling in love and possibly staying on than trying to find logic in everything your lover does to the extent of separating every two months you fall in love, because in such instances, it will be convenient to say that, the wise has rather become a fool by not dwelling in the fool’s paradise.