Last year, Mukesh Chandrakar, a reporter from Chhattisgarh who spoke about the condition of local roads, was murdered, and his body was found days later in a septic tank. Mukesh had been reporting on crumbling infrastructure and the risks people face every day because of it. He highlighted the corruption in the road construction project, documenting irregular contracts, siphoned public funds, and the people involved in the scam and paid the price for it. His case, not unlike others, have become an unsettling marker of how precarious it can be to speak truth to power around basic civic issues in this country. One couldn't imagine that not too long ago there was a television show that didn’t just joke about everyday frustrations like these — it made it a point to bring them into Indian living rooms with honesty and wit.

In 1989, 'Flop Show' aired on Doordarshan — ten episodes of satire written, directed, and fronted by Jaspal Bhatti. On the surface, it was a comedy. But what made it memorable was the way it held up a mirror to the systems people bumped up against every day: endless committees that solved nothing, official labyrinths that trap citizens, fake claims and misaligned incentives in hospitals, and the very real absurdities of a public that had learned to grin through its frustrations.

Jaspal Bhatti was not a comedian in the usual sense. Born in Amritsar in 1955, educated as an engineer, he crossed over into performance with a restless eye on society’s blind spots. Through street theatre and skits in the 1980s, he found ways to make people laugh at the very things that annoyed them: corruption, red tape, and the way power was hoarded in offices and meeting rooms. When Flop Show landed on national television, it felt like an honest exhale — here was someone naming what everyone experienced but rarely talked about.

The episodes were deceptively simple in structure but rich in critical observations. In one, Bhatti’s character leads a government office that knows more about calling meetings than making decisions. Files get pushed around bureaucratically, while committees breed sub-committees, and the drama of change never quite arrives. In another, he plays a professor guiding research students, a setup that quickly spins into a satire about power dynamics in academic life. Other stories take aim at fake medical reimbursements, the travails of getting a phone line in those days, and even the way television producers sometimes chase glossy ideas while ignoring substance. 

Another looks at the medical system, where inflated bills and fake claims pass through because everyone involved knows the rules and knows how to bend them. There’s an episode about applying for a telephone connection, which at the time was a long, humiliating process dependent on the mood and availability of a lineman who held all the power. The PhD episode focuses on the uneven relationship between students and supervisors, where academic authority becomes a tool for exploitation. Others take on contractors building poor-quality public infrastructure, landlords using loopholes to harass tenants, and social functions where the entire event is stalled because an important guest hasn’t arrived yet. The final episode turns the camera inward, poking fun at television producers who have money and airtime but little interest and responsibility the kind of content they produce. 

'Flop Show' was about the working class that was just above the poverty line but lived out its entire life inside paperwork. Clerks, junior engineers, teachers, research students, tenants — people who needed government offices to function because that’s where their jobs, housing, education, and healthcare were routed. It showed the small delays and frustrations people faced every day: waiting for a file to be cleared, trying to get a reimbursement approved, attempting to get a phone connection. Bhatti’s characters knew how the offices worked because they dealt with them constantly. They stood in lines, filled out forms, and learned who they had to be polite to so their work could move forward. The humour came from the inefficiencies of different systems that people couldn't really rely on, and it aired on Doordarshan at a time when it was the country’s main broadcaster. Even the disclaimers on each episode were explicitly dedicated to the "officers who selfishly misuse government resources for their personal gain".

It was the show that didn't separate the intellectual class from the working one. It treated them as one and the same. The writing was sharp and nuanced even if it was for and about the so-called common man. Neither did it depend on slapstick or caricature alone: it expected the viewer to know the world it was talking about. Bhatti spoke to his audience as participants in the same systems that generated the absurdities he dramatized. Every episode began with a deadpan dedication to the target of its satire and ended with a parody of a Hindi song, a way of bookending critique with cultural familiarity. 

Even its characters were recognizably flawed — they were part of the problem even as they pointed it out. That was part of the show’s intelligence. It gently made us laugh, but it also asked us to look at why these frustrations existed at all, and how normal they had become. It was social commentary disguised as comedy, but it was never patronizing about its viewers’ ability to understand what was at stake.

Looking back at that era feels like a different media landscape entirely. 'Flop Show' was a natural product of a time when dissatisfaction with the state could be spoken about openly. Complaints about bad roads, inefficient offices, corrupt systems, and failing public services could be aired on national television without being treated as a threat. Today, satire that touches on systemic problems often gets tangled in debates about loyalty, nationalism, or taste. Voices that critique power structures can be sidelined, even vilified, just because they demand accountability and attention to uncomfortable truths. 

Many episodes of 'Flop Show' are available on YouTube but watching them today is a disorienting experience and a bitter realization of how we much we have regressed; and lulled within a slow and insidious push towards a fascist climate. Flop Show now exists as a relic and a reminder of how something fundamental to a healthy civic culture has been lost.  

Watch an episode of the show below:

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