iâm disappointed to see swapnil go.
i was rooting for him. i think he had a lot of great designs that were overlooked. i think he failed this challenge, but not for lack of trying. he fucking tried. he tried really hard to please his model/client, and he scrapped two entire designs to start over for her, and she would not concede a single thing for him. so the judgesâ reasoning of sending him packing for not trying was bull.
look, merlineâs model didnât love the jacket, but she met merline halfway with it, and then trusted merlineâs vision. the other girl didnât trust swapnil, and in spite of the fact that he kept trying to listen to her, she complained that she wasnât being heard. and swapnil really visibly tried to meet her halfway. he was hurt and upset by the issues she had. maybe he didnât get her, but he accepted that they had different tastes and ideas, and he tried to make it work for her. but she didnât try. she didnât want to try. she set him up to fail. and i feel like it was done on purpose.
so i donât understand timâs problem with swapnil. iâm reading things like tim was frustrated with him for being lazy, and the judges felt he wasnât trying, and i think it stems from a misunderstanding over something he admitted earlier in the show. that was clearly the turning point when they started focusing on him in a particular light very abruptly. he said he was trying to play the competition with a strategy of staying safe until the chaff was eliminated, and then winning. i think they took that to mean that he thought he was too good for them, and that he didnât need to give it his all to stay in the game. i think he was simply just trying to play it like a reality show, and didnât realize that he was being perceived as lazy or arrogant. and once he realized that, he tried. he tried in the previous challenge, and he tried in this one, too. and they treated him really unfairly.
the other designers had a genuine affection for swapnil, and i donât think that wouldâve been the case if he was arrogant. i think the cameras played up the smoke breaks, and tim overreacted a little (a lot), and certainly the judges were unnecessarily harsh. theyâve given worse designers more of a pass, but i think swapnil was punished for the audacity of thinking he could win by strategy. how dare he think of that when they had all the power in their hands??
the more i think about it, the more i see similarities with sandhya in s13, too. she was constantly marginalized and misunderstood, but instead of it coming from the judges (as in swapnilâs case), it came from her fellow contestants. and honestly, it was kind of annoying that no one stood up for her, or understood her. even in the reunion, she tries to tell emily that she was âthe last person who stood upâ for her, meaning that emily was there for her in the end, and emily loses her temper because she thinks sandhya meant that everyone but emily stood up for her. you can see sandhya try to explain herself and then get talked over. the designers insist they love her and that itâs not personal, and the show edits out their nasty racist gossip in the compilation of âproofâ to make it seem like all their criticism was simply only about her designs. it was such bullshit. i hated like they all acted like they were so sweet and wonderful when they absolutely were not. and then the show lied for them by omission.
i guess i just felt like it was cool being able to see indian designers on the show, but now as i see it, there seems to be a glass ceiling. it sucks, and itâs disappointing. the entire time the indians are there, they face some form of racism or discrimination that ultimately goes unaddressed, unresolved, and unattended to, which is bullshit. itâs 2015, you cannot say shit like âi donât speak indianâ, and no one has an issue with that. and once they cross into the later stages of the competition, theyâre expendable. sandhyaâs onesie from hell was bad, but one bad outfit doesnât get you thrown out, especially if youâve won multiple times like sandhya. yes, even at that stage it shouldâve kept her safe, as evidenced by the sheer number of times charketa and her crap was saved by tim.
so yeah, i love tim, but him swearing at swapnil, plus the frosty goodbye, was really uncalled for. i think they treated him badly in the send off, and im disappointed.
