Amid chatter that the Thiruvananthapuram contestant hired a publicist before entering the house, his mother and a friend showed reporters his asbestos-roofed home and detailed his daily-wage work.
Shijin, the Thiruvananthapuram contestant on Bigg Boss Malayalam Season 8, has been tagged the show's genuine "commoner" pick, and this week his family decided to prove it on camera.
According to Filmibeat Malayalam, Shijin's mother and a close friend invited media into the family's home after rumours spread online that he has a hired PR person managing his campaign inside the house. The family lives in an old, asbestos-roofed house, and the report says both parents and Shijin himself have long worked as daily-wage labourers to keep the household running.
The friend told Filmibeat Malayalam that Shijin has done everything from cutting wood to milking cows for wages, alongside running a dance academy with close to fifty students. Poor children who want to learn dance, the friend said, are taught for free, a detail the family wanted out in the open specifically because of the PR chatter.
"Ellathinum avan pokum," is roughly how the friend described Shijin's willingness to take up any kind of labour, according to the report, tying it to his single stated ambition: owning a house of his own.
The family's account gets specific about where they currently live. Shijin and his mother are staying in a house originally built for his younger sister, who is now married, the report says. His mother continues to take up wage work at various places and keeps a cow, using that income to support the household along with what Shijin brings in.
On his one visible shortcoming inside the house, the friend was candid, telling Filmibeat Malayalam that Shijin struggles to express what's on his mind and was specifically asked to be more vocal and to react more before he went in, since he doesn't operate with any group inside the house. He apparently told them he isn't interested in winning through performance for the cameras, and was sent in with instructions to improve on that front regardless.
The family says it had initially refused when people asked to film the house and its surroundings, deciding only later that the full picture needed to be public, given how the PR allegations were being used, in the friend's telling, by some to generate attention for themselves. Shijin reportedly told the family not to hand over footage to anyone before he entered the house, saying there was no need for it. Whether that decision to go public now settles the argument is something Bigg Boss Malayalam's audience will have to decide for themselves as the season runs on.
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