Raghu Ram, creator and host of reality show MTV Roadies, is a cult figure among Indian college students. But he says he is a shy recluse

In the flesh, Raghu Ram of MTV Roadies doesn’t seem like an angry man. If anything, he is reticent—a trifle unsure why he is even giving this interview. “What have you read about me?” he quizzes us, and then breaks into an amused smirk when we tell him Google didn’t throw up much.

“Whatever it may have thrown up is wrong as well,” he says.

Sitting on a sofa at his Versova home, he drinks one cup of tea after another. Now and then, he pats his retriever Zuk-Zuk, high-fives his nephew, and discusses chores with his wife. He almost seems like an ordinary man. But the Legend of Raghu Ram would insist he is not. Some people have named their first-borns Roadies and second-borns Raghu, he tells us, sounding disturbed. Some fans have tattooed the reality show’s name on their bodies or changed their last names to it.

At first glance, his TV show has a regular format. It’s a contest that follows a bunch of youngsters travelling India on bikes. But it has gathered a cult following ever since it kicked off in 2003, and almost every college kid knows why. There are challenges to be won, fights to be fought, politics to be played, and the ‘Roadies’ tag to take home. There is also another big draw: Raghu Ram himself, the show’s director-cum-host whose own stardom rests on his rough biker persona. Along with his twin brother Rajiv and VJ Rannvijay, a Roadies champ himself, Raghu berates the participants, showers them with expletives, and sometimes even hits a few physically (especially during auditions). And for all this, Roadies’ wannabes crave his approval. “It’s a world he created,” he says of his screen self, “and he is its King, even god.”

Growing up, though, was a different reality. “Rajiv and I were not of this world, and that was detrimental to everything we did. We were not good academically and I could sense the disappointment in my parents.” The son of a journalist and a chartered accountant, he dropped out of college in his third year. “I needed a job. I didn’t have a choice. And I joined TV18 because they were hiring people as interns and needed no qualification. That’s why I ended up there.”

He has been working in the industry for 16 years now, and since Roadies, has gained the reputation of the ‘rudest man on television’. In a country accustomed to prim politeness, he does get some hate mail and clenched fists. But he knows it comes with the turf—or road, rather. “I am very good at what I do,” he says matter-of-factly, “I don’t know if I have an inborn talent for this, but I have never seen anybody work as hard as me. I don’t sleep and don’t even need to eat.”

The show is in a class of its own, with Raghu’s ‘don’t-mess-with-me’ bearing a cult symbol in its own right. Why, the animated version of him in the show’s promotional clips even has him holding a gun as he rattles wannabe roadies with his put-downs. “Do you think I look scary?” he asks. We are tempted to say ‘yes’. “I think it’s so funny that people think of me as scary,” he says, “If anything, I have always been and still am painfully shy. As a child, I was protected. Rajiv was the gregarious one and went out and made friends.” Rajiv, though, has a slightly different spin on this: “Raghu and I balance each other out. There are days when I am quiet and he is boisterous.” On Raghu’s celebrity status, the twin chuckles, “We don’t subscribe to that aura. We never even think about it.”

Raghu does seem to get twitchy talking about the nastier ramifications of the ‘Raghu Ram legend’. “After Season 4, everything changed. People wanted to get into fights with me—even slapping me would get them bragging rights in their college or office. The [Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the BJP’s students wing] attacked me. And though I can deal with people’s perceptions of me, people liking me is a big problem. They take pictures with their phones. I get mobbed everywhere I go. So I stopped going out, and went and lived in the Himalayas for 15 months. I couldn’t take it—but even there, if I went to the market to shop for veggies, I would get followed.”

Raghu now has a bodyguard. “He keeps people away. I can’t deal with this. For many months, I didn’t even leave my room. One day, my wife took me downstairs, but as soon as I saw a bunch of kids approach me, I turned back and shut the door.” He compares the attention to being ‘molested’ and insists he is a recluse. “I only hang out with the same friends, most of them musicians, because our jam sessions are about the music, not me.”

Fame, however, makes few allowances for privacy. “Once my [Facebook] account got hacked and pictures were leaked, and I have become so much more reclusive since then,” he says, “Nobody even knew I was married… my wife once asked me, ‘Why do you hide me?’ But I have so many haters and I don’t want that hate getting deflected towards her.”

Raghu’s good friend K Mohan of the band Agnee, with whom Raghu jams often, laughs loudly when told of Raghu’s confession of shyness. “He is the life of the party and an extreme extrovert,” he says, “If Raghu is having a party, you can’t leave before 8 in the morning. He is just acting coy with you.” Mohan has been a direct witness to the mass hysteria that Raghu tends to evoke. “I went with him to Delhi once, and all these kids had camped out overnight for the auditions, and as soon as they saw Raghu, they went crazy. One guy actually came up to him and said, ‘If I oppose you in all that you say, I am in, right?’ As a friend, he is a great guy. I have stayed at his house when I was a struggler. He has an infectious personality. And Agnee owes him a lot. When we first recorded our first hit, Sadho Re, he actually told us how we had used the Kabir doha in it wrong. He may not look like a person who reads Kabir, but there, that’s another surprise for you.”

For some, the surprise is Roadies’ longevity. Its successful run is nearing a decade now, and it remains every bit as popular among college goers in India as it ever was. Acquiring the ‘Roadies spirit’ is still a badge of honour for contestants, and just surviving Raghu’s torturous audition is enough to turn them into heroes in the perception of their peers.

Raghu was initially against these auditions being broadcast, but agrees that it has worked well. “People now think they know what to expect, so I have to up my game each time. I need to see reactions. Remember, everything is real. It’s a real experience for us, and that’s why it’s a real experience for the viewer.” He gets agitated at our mention of his bad language and physical abuse, but the phrase ‘social responsibility’ makes him laugh. “If someone is being sexist, I have a social responsibility to thrash him,” he says, “Why should I change my reactions if they don’t change their thinking? I have never said ‘I am a good guy’ or ‘bad guy’. I just have a social responsibility of making intolerance uncool,” he says, “This behaviour that everyone talks about is one of the least important things on the show. What’s important is that it’s one of the only platforms in India where kids can talk about things like sexuality, love, marriage, and everything that matters to them without moderation. And during the show, they are tested on their strengths, their moral and value systems. That’s what Roadies is.”

He gets another cup of tea, and speaks of the ‘high’ the show gives him. “I tried movies, but they didn’t give me that creative satisfaction. The good thing about celebrity status is that now I have a voice—when something happens, people call me for my reactions. I like having a voice that matters.” But it also gives everyone out there a licence to psychoanalyse him. Does he bully kids, some wonder, because he himself was bullied as a kid? “I was bullied, but that’s not connected to this at all. Anyway, you can’t psychoanalyse me because I control how I am shown… But nor can I say I am not that person. I am who I am, but in these TV situations, a certain side comes out.”

“He tells it like it is and that’s what kids love about him,” says Raghu’s actress wife, Sugandha (Shaleen in Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na). She recalls that the first thing that attracted her to him, while he was her boss on a BBC show, was his dedication and hard work. On Roadies, he’s the same—pushing people to perform. “Sometimes, kids need to be pushed into a corner to see how they will react,” she says, “After all, we need interesting kids to get selected. They are going to be on a show, and content has to be generated.”

At home, the King of TV doesn’t watch any at all. There are no movie marathons either. It’s either a jam session with friends over some Indian folk music, or he’s just busy reading one of his several books at a time (right now, this includes one on Whitney Houston). “One day,” he says, as we wrap up, “I am going to write a book. After all that is said about me, I think it’s imperative for me to tell my side of the story. One day…”