Tej Pratap Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s elder son, may be a politician by profession, but watching his reality show, I started wondering if he has been preparing for this all along.
Politician-turned-reality-show contestant Teju Bhaiya seems to be on a run to show off his skills on reality shows. It started with Bhojpuri Bawaal, where we saw him do things one would hardly expect from a political leader alongside some of the biggest names in the Bhojpuri industry. Now he is on Rise and Fall Season 2, and there too, he seems to be giving it his all. At this point, it genuinely looks like Tej Pratap really wants to win it.
This is not a new side of Tej Pratap. Reality shows have simply given him a platform big enough for the personality he has already been displaying for years.
Politics meets showbiz
Take Bhojpuri Bawaal. Tej Pratap walks into a classroom at a university in Patna and, within minutes, goes from talking about cinema to objecting to obscene scenes in the Bhojpuri industry. He also shows them a photograph of himself from his pilot-training days, but nobody recognises him. His reaction is perhaps the most genuinely funny moment of the show. Imagine being Tej Pratap Yadav, showing your own photograph to a room full of students and discovering your political identity has not travelled as far as you thought.
But then the show gets even more unpredictable. Yadav suddenly starts teaching yoga. Then he plays the flute and asks a PhD scholar sitting nearby to play it. When the scholar fails, Tej Pratap simply wipes the flute on the scholar’s T-shirt. Moments later, when a student starts singing, he gets emotional. All of this happens within what is essentially one small sequence.
He is a politician, film critic, yoga teacher, musician and emotional reality-show contestant.
He even promises students that he will raise their voice in the ‘Sansad’. Whether he or any leader from his Jan Shakti Dal will actually become an MP is for time to tell. But as a television personality, he seems to have already found his constituency.
His love for the screen is no secret. Even away from reality shows, he has spent years experimenting since he started his first YouTube channel, LR Vlogs, in 2021, uploading daily vlogs without missing a day. The content could range from talking to a puppet monkey hanging on his shoulder to celebrating his YouTube Silver Play Button by distributing sweets, and then suddenly turning himself into a tech YouTuber by unboxing a new camera for his vlogging setup.
In one vlog, he visits an amusement park in Patna called Disneyland. Sitting in the backseat of his car, he recalls how he and his brother used to visit the “Disneyland Mela” as children.
“We used to watch different kinds of fairy rides, different sweet shops and shopping stalls, and now I want to see what has changed,” he said.
When his channel crossed one lakh subscribers, the celebration did not remain confined to YouTube. Large banners carrying his photograph appeared across the streets of Patna, thanking people for helping him reach the milestone and urging them to subscribe further.
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The local ghostbuster
He eventually stopped uploading on LR Vlogs, but returned last year with a new channel, TY Vlogs. The production quality was better, the cameras were better, and the sound was better, but the content remained unmistakably Tej Pratap.
On the channel, he becomes a food vlogger tasting lassi, a detective explaining how a theft allegedly took place at his house and in another video, he started confronting a local reporter and alleging that the reporter had been sent by his political opponents.
And then, naturally, he became a ghostbuster.
After dismissing claims of haunted places in Patna, he exposed his own “ghost” as Munna, a house staffer dressed in white and planted on a mango tree, before turning to the camera and asking, “Bhoot lag rahe hain ye aapko? (Is he looking like a ghost to you all?)”
And now, on Rise and Fall, the politician, during a break, is on the dance floor, where he tries to copy Kajal’s moves with his skills from a Bhojpuri dance number.
At least for me, his presence on Rise and Fall does not feel surprising. He was always unpredictable. Reality shows reward people who are unpredictable, emotional, dramatic, entertaining and willing to put themselves on display.
Tej Pratap has been doing all of that long before a reality-show camera entered his life.
Most politicians spend years carefully constructing a public image. Tej Pratap is happy to destroy the boundaries between politician, vlogger, performer and reality-show contestant.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)