(From top) Shamita Shetty, Poonam Dhillon and Rajesh Khanna

Mumbai, Oct. 4: Reality bites, but for over-the-hill celebs, reality rocks.

Ask Shilpa Shetty, who perched her flagging Bollywood career on the coattails of the British TV hit Big Brother to ride to international fame and fortune.

She has now inspired a sister-act. Sibling Shamita, a Bollywood starlet once linked to cricketer Yuvraj Singh, has now entered the desi Bigg Boss for its Season 3 run.

Keeping her company in the House — with a much smaller floor plan this season owing to recession — will be the long forgotten Loveleen Mishra (Chhutki of Humlog vintage) and Poonam Dhillon, the 70s and 80s actress who began promisingly with Yash Chopra hits like Trishul, Noorie and Kaala Patthar, but had few successes after that.

It is back to the 70 and 80s for the men as well — Aditya Panscholi (in the news last year for a romantic involvement with daughter’s friend Kangana Ranaut) and Puneet Issar — Duryodhan of the TV blockbuster Mahabharat.

The icing on the cake of course is said to be a later entry into the Bigg Boss house by Rajesh Khanna, India’s first megastar until eclipsed by Amitabh Bachchan, the host of the show this season.

Sources in Colors, which will telecast the show from tonight, said though last-minute details are yet to be finalised, the presence of Kaka — as Rajesh Khanna is known — in the House at a later stage is more or less certain.

“We saw it as an opportunity to play up the old rumoured rivalry between the Big B and Rajeshji. After all Mr Bachchan is the host of the show. But Kaka himself had no qualms about it. He was very excited in fact to get back into the mind space of today’s generation,” said a source in the creative team of Colors.

In the West too, reality TV has revived many a slipping celeb career. Before American reality show Newlyweds, Jessica Simpson was just another blonde bubblegum pop singer in the mould of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. But then she married Nick Lachey of boyband 98 Degrees and kept the cameras rolling long after their wedding.

The pair have since split up, but not without milking their fifteen minutes of fame — Simpson’s album In This Skin was re-released due to her increasing popularity, and hit Number 2 on the Billboard charts. Lachey too released What’s Left of Me, still clutching on to the straws of fame he had attained with his ex-wife.

Kelly Osbourne, the daughter of rocker Ozzy Osbourne, became a celebrity in her own right when MTV chronicled the antics of her dysfunctional family in The Osbournes.

Back home, there are the likes of Kerala actress Shobhana who is now being seen in the new avatar of a judge on reality show Vanita Ratnam telecast on Amrita TV.

Reality TV has also made stars of virtual nobodies. Bhojpuri actor Raja Chowdhury and Rahul Mahajan, the son of BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, devoid of any particular individual talent but regular in social circles, are now household names after the success of Bigg Boss last year.

“Both Raja and Rahul’s careers got a huge boost after Bigg Boss Season 2. Now they are professional reality TV stars, splashed over all channels.

Not everybody can be a small or big-screen superstar. Reality TV offers these people the opportunity to get back into circulation and emerge as an all new species – the Reality TV star. It is the most sought after and paying job on Indian television today,” says the Colors source.