Monica Bedi

Kashmera Shah

Roshni Chopra

Sambhavana Seth

Sheher ki ladkiyan ab banengi desi kudiyan. If you thought that you had been put through every kind of reality show possible, then here’s a new one. Eight glam women (four of them are in the pictures above) will hop from champagne parties to the mustard fields of Punjab in Desi Girl — Imagine’s newest reality format after the popular Swayamvar series.

From milking a cow to making dung cakes, from ploughing the fields to driving a tractor, these television personalities will make Sialba Majri, a tiny hamlet in the interiors of Punjab, their home for an entire month.

“The idea is to displace these celebrities from their familiar surroundings sans any material comforts and give them a taste of the real rural India,” says Shailja Kejriwal, executive vice president (content), Imagine.

A “partly created partly inspired” format, Desi Girl is a joint production with BBC television, with dollops of its 2001 format Celebrity Sleepover. “We took the basic premise from Celebrity Sleepover’s format of a celeb spending a night with a family and moulded it for an Indian audience,” says Kejriwal.

Desi Girl also has shades of The Simple Life where America watched Paris Hilton and best friend Nicole Richie clean farms, mop floors and wait at restaurant tables.

At Sialba Majri, the eight girls will live with eight different villagers —“not as guests, but as family”, stresses Kejriwal — and be subject to daily chores as well as the occasional backbreaking task. “There will be no cell phones, no ACs, maybe not even fans,” says Kejriwal. At the end of every week, it will be the villagers who will meet, panchayat-style, and eliminate one contestant.

“It’s the collision of two worlds — the villagers will at once be enamoured of as well as antagonistic towards these girls and that is what will make the show engrossing,” promises Kejriwal.

And who will these eight glam girls be? From Monica Bedi to Kashmera Shah, Sambhavana Seth to Isshita Arun, Roshni Chopra to Anmol Singh, Rucha Gujarati to Aushima Sawhney, the line-up reads like an “item girls’ special”.

“We zeroed in on these eight because we felt that they had the patience and the spunk to last a month in extremely trying conditions. Besides, these girls are very attached to their roots and also know how to have fun,” says Kejriwal. Imagine favourite Rakhi Sawant was also in contention, but dropped out at the last minute for a reality show on a rival channel.

Desi Girl comes close on the heels of The Big Switch, a show where rich yuppies traded places with slum residents. Wouldn’t too much of the same thing result in overkill? “The Big Switch was shot on a set. There was nothing natural about the show. Desi Girl is about real people with real emotions. This is the real deal,” says Kejriwal.

Desi Girl goes on air in May.

(Which item girl will prove to be the best desi girl? Tell t2@abpmail.com)