Crowd favorites, Mona Singh and Harbhajan Singh, are the winners of the Ek Khiladi Ek Hasina contest, if rumors are to believed. Those in the know – the programme has already been wrapped up and results will be declared at the end of the TV show – say that Mona and Harbhajan have beaten close contestants Sreesanth and Surveen to be the winners of the Ek Khiladi Ek Hasina contest.

Harbhajan Singh and Mona Singh

Of course, this will be no surprise to those who avidly follow the show. Mona and Bhajji are the only couple to have connected with audiences with their sheer joie de vivre, despite a vital handicap – Bhajji can’t dance saala.

But on the dance floor, Mona and Bhajji come across as college kids having fun. They are friends, they enjoy dancing together, they don’t mind making mistakes and they improvise. In episode 5, where Mona plays a girl in a portrait who comes to life; at the end of the song, she goes back into the portrait. In an impromptu touch, she jumps out of the portrait at Bhajji saying “Boooo!”

Mona Singh, with her Punjabi chutzpah, seems to have worked wonders with Bhajji. He makes up for his lack of talent and gawkiness with sheer enthusiasm and vulnerability. Mona just carries him along, when he looks unsure or timid. Mona herself has been quoted as saying, “I’ve almost become his choreographer. He completely depends on me to see him through.”

If Mona and Bhajji become the winners of the Ek Khiladi Ek Hasina show, it will be another feather in the cap for Mona Singh, who was the winner of the first Jhalak Dikhla Jaa dance show in 2006.

The two are in a bit of a soup, though, with the VHP lodging a complaint against Mona and Bhajji for playing Sita and Ravan in one of the episodes. Before that, the Akhal Takht was also displeased by this particular performance.

The good news for Mona is that she will make her Bollywood debut in Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots starring Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor.

Sreesanth and Surveen Chawla

Coming to the other two potential winners, Sreesanth and Surveen. Both are brilliant dancers, but not winners. And that, unsurprisingly, is solely Sreesanth’s fault. The man seems to operate in some parallel universe. He doesn’t even make eye contact with his partner, let alone the camera. He refuses to try any new forms of dance, and if he does, it’s half-hearted. With him, it’s only Break Dance or Break a Leg.

Dancing to their own tunes is best left to the mystics. Sreesanth sure ain’t no mystic; he’s clearly a misfit. And, he doesn’t even know it. I wonder what their choreographers are doing. Surely, such an important point – that he must be part of the team to be a winner  – needs to be communicated to the guy.

The other reason, I suspect, he is no fave with the audience, is that mostly everyone is terrified the sissy-istic mystic is going to burst into tears and hiccups anytime soon.

Now that, Shama Sikander and Vinod Kambli have exhausted their tear (Shama) & gas (Kambli) arsenal, it’s Sreesanth’s turn to unleash his tear bomb. He is precipitously poised; I can smell it in the air. As a South Indian, I want to box his ears, for presenting such a piteous picture of the average Southie, and reinforcing the daboo Southie image among Northies.

It’s a pity that someone who is so talented on and off the playing field, loses out because he just doesn’t know the joys and tears (yes tears, but of the happy kind) of being part of a team. There are those who are so insecure that they can’t be team players, and there are those pathetic ones who don’t even know that there is a word called TEAM. Sreesanth, sadly, is one of them.

The winner of the Ek Khiladi Ek Hasina show will take home Rs 25 lakh. The contestants of the show are Sreeshant and Surveen Chawla, Harbhajan Singh with Mona Singh, Irfan Pathan with Ashima Bhalla, Dinesh Kartik with Nigar Z Khan, Nikhil Chopra with Barkha Bisht, and Vinod Kambli with Shama Sikander.