It can pay to be just a face in the crowd

MUMBAI, India -- Eighteen-year-old Mital Limbad stretches lazily in bed in her tiny, one-room tenement. It is 8:30 a.m., and she has been home for only a few hours, having spent the previous night at a long and tiring TV shoot.

As her family goes about the morning chores, her cellphone rings. Limbad answers it, listens and hangs up.

“I need to be at the Cinevista studio in two hours,” she says.

“What show will you be on this time?” asks her mother, Jyoti, 39.

“ ‘K for Kishore,’ ” she answers, referring to a popular TV talent show. Her mother and her younger sister and brother cheer.

“I am a ‘crowd,’ ” explains Limbad, who dropped out of school after the 10th grade. She spreads toothpaste on a brush and goes to the kitchen, which has a tap with running water in one corner. “People like me form the crowd in reality TV shows, like song-and-dance talent hunts. We earn our living this way.”

She has attended hundreds of tapings in the last seven months, earning a little more than $5 per show. She makes at least $150 a month and hands it to her father, who makes roughly that much as a tailor.

The boom in audience-based private television shows in India in the last decade has spawned previously unheard-of careers for poor, unemployed young people with limited education. Limbad notes, though, that being a member of a TV show audience isn’t just a matter of clapping and cheering.

“I have to work long hours going from one shoot to the next,” she says after she emerges from her five-minute bucket bath wearing a pink shirt and blue jeans with floral embroidery on the thighs.

“We cannot wear Indian clothes to the show, only jeans and shirts,” she explains. Her mother squats on the floor watching Limbad hastily comb her curly hair.

“She misses the last train at 1:40 a.m. sometimes and sleeps on the train platform with her friends. She takes the first train home at 4 a.m.,” her mother says. “Eat something. Don’t go out on an empty stomach.”

“No, I will eat lunch at the studio,” Limbad says, referring to the free meals, snacks and tea provided to the crowd.

At 9 a.m., a neighbor, Sanjay Panchal, 20, shows up. He is also a “crowd” and goes with her to most of the shoots. But since this is one of the few jobs in India’s entertainment industry in which men earn less than women, Panchal makes only $3 per shoot.

“Oh, I am glad you are going too,” Limbad’s mother says. “It is not safe for a girl to go alone. A daughter is always a source of worry for parents. I stay up all night when she is late. That is why we bought her a cellphone.”

“Don’t worry, auntie,” Panchal says. “This job is like a picnic. You get free food, you meet friends. You listen to music and clap, dance and cheer. And you get paid for it.”

“They don’t allow you to dance and cheer always,” Limbad says, standing before the mirror. “Sometimes you just have to sway silently with the music during hours and hours of retake. You have to laugh at things that are not funny. There is no respect for the crowd.”

“But my face was on TV!” Panchal says. “And I like pressing the button to vote for the show’s best singer or dancer. I am deciding somebody’s future.”

At 9:15 a.m., they leave for work, descending a perilous iron stairway outside their homes in a low-income neighborhood. They walk past sleeping dogs and women in front of water taps. Curious eyes peer at them from behind shop counters and half-open doors.

“People look at me differently. They whisper when they see me go out,” Limbad says. “They don’t know what I do, but they suspect I am in the entertainment industry. They have all kind of images in their minds about what kind of a girl I am.”

They board a red city bus, and Limbad sits in the “ladies’ section.”

When they arrive at the studio at 10:45 a.m., the lawn is buzzing with the noises of young men and women.

“Everyone is a ‘crowd’ here,” says Limbad’s friend, Meenakshi Jaiswal, 21, sipping hot milky tea under a tree and wearing a traditional Indian costume. “I am carrying jeans and T-shirt in my bag,” she adds. “My neighbors are conservative, so I do not leave my home in jeans.”

The girls giggle and whisper about a boy who is staring at them. He walks over and asks, “Will you be my girlfriend?”

One girl says, “No, I will be your sister,” and everybody laughs.

“Crowd life is not very good,” Limbad says as TV cranes, tripods and screens are moved into place nearby. “Young girls and boys start smoking, drinking and having affairs here. They want to ape the lives of the stars who come to the sets.”

Limbad says a scandal broke out a few months ago in the “crowd world” when a “crowd girl” was offered $25 extra to kiss the cheek of a young TV host on the popular “SaReGaMaPa” show.

“When it came on TV, her family and neighbors were shocked. Her mother beat her,” Limbad whispers. “And her fiance broke off the engagement out of shame.”

After two hours of endless cups of tea and then lunch, the producers call the crowd in. One by one, the young men and women enter the sparkly set, with its velvet curtains and fake Corinthian columns, a glittering crescent moon and a dark ceiling full of stars.

A man screams into his microphone. “Audience! Silence!”