Cyrus Broacha

It’s April Fool’s Day for you. But for a certain Cyrus Broacha and all his fans, April 1 will always be Bakra Day. And this year too, the whole of April Fool’s Day will have Cyrus hunting bakras on MTV.

This time, the MTV Bakra Din Special will be about the Indian Bakra League! Cashing in on the flavour of the season — the Indian Premier League Twenty20 cricket tournament — MTV unleashes Bakra on cricketers, commentators and fans! And guess which cricketers will be at the receiving end of Cyrus’s bakras? Rahul Dravid and Virender Sehwag from Team India, plus Parthiv Patel and Vinod Kambli! And if you are missing the glam element, there will Mandira Bedi in action as well.

“Around 50 per cent will be new cricket gags, whereas the rest will be some of the popular celebrity gags which everyone likes to watch over and over again,” Cyrus tells t2.

It’s been 10 years since Bakra first beamed on the small screen. And Cyrus has his favourites. “I enjoyed the taxi gags a lot,” he reveals. “There would be so many variables — the car would not start, the passenger would want to get down in the middle of the trip, the telephone (part of the gag) would not go off, I wouldn’t know the area the passenger would want me to drive to. It was a real test. Also very tough was doing a gag with a big crowd. And it would be great fun if it came off. Then the dead body gags were great fun — the reactions would be genuine…. You got to be in the car to see their faces; it’s not as much fun on TV.”

Cyrus is not bothered that every other channel has tried to replicate Bakra. “I have been only told about them… I only watch sports channels and they don’t air them on that! I enjoy the fact that the audiences mistake them for Bakra because people come to me at airports and say maine yeh dekha, maine woh dekha… And I have no idea what they are talking about. So we get a lot of credit for gags we haven’t done. I am sure some of them are very good, it’s not rocket science!”

And if you are planning to get naughty today, Cyrus has some ideas. “I have already told my son to tell his teacher in school that the next day, April 2, is a public holiday for Parsis and he wouldn’t be turning up at school! See, in the terrible times we are in — terrorism and recession and everything — one day of masti won’t do too much harm,” he signs off.

Bakra basics

Bakra was never a show initially. It was a small segment of a show called True Lies on MTV

The barber shop gags in the early days of Bakra, where Cyrus is playing various roles — drunkard, doctor, gay, big scissors, etc — are some of the greatest bakras ever played

From unsuspecting residents of Mumbai Bakra went national, did gags in various cities, colleges and soon the show started fooling celebrities as well

The Bakra jokes have often backfired on Cyrus landing him in a spot. Many gags were played on him and the very first one was a cop taking him to a police station when he was doing a taxi driver gag.