Roadies on MTV India - 9 year old boy dies imitating stunt on TV

Copying a stunt from a reality show cost a nine-year-old boy his life. Chandan Singh Rawat, an ardent fan of MTV’s reality show Roadies accidentally hanged himself while imitating a stunt from the show.

Chandan, who was living here with his uncle Bhagat Singh for the past four years, had watched the Roadies episode where two female contestants were made to stand on a wooden stool with their hands tied. A rope was also placed around their neck.

Last fortnight, the hundred-plus employees of MTV, the music channel from Viacom 18 (a 50:50 venture between Viacom Inc and Network 18), cut a 15-kg cake at their funky office at Parel in Mumbai. The occasion, as MTV’s general manager and senior vice-president (creative & content), Ashish Patil, explains, was the channel’s highest ever viewership in India. So much so, the channel dared to compare its gross rating points (GRPs, the weekly total of television rating points which is viewership into time spent) to general entertainment channels (GECs) such as NDTV Imagine and Sab TV.

In the last three weeks, MTV’s GRPs have risen from 79 to 81 to 83. In the final week, 5 million people tuned into the channel. Its two reality shows, Roadies and Splitsvilla, are ramping up viewership numbers at a fast clip. Roadies has clocked a rating of 3.5 and above, while Splitsvilla touched 1.71 this week

Lucknow, April 19: Nine-year-old Chandan Singh, an avid watcher of MTV’s reality show Roadies, hanged himself accidentally while imitating a stunt on the show. Chandan, a Class 3 student, had watched the episode where two female contestants were made to stand on a wooden stool with their hands tied. A rope was also placed around their neck. Another semi-finalist was then given three minutes to save one of them. "He watched the episode on the third floor of our house along with his friends and tried to imitate the stunt after his friends left," his uncle said. —IANS