i’m 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 judges’ reasoning of sending him packing for not trying was bull.
look, merline’s model didn’t love the jacket, but she met merline halfway with it, and then trusted merline’s vision. the other girl didn’t trust swapnil, and in spite of the fact that he kept trying to listen to her, she complained that she wasn’t being heard. and swapnil really visibly tried to meet her halfway. he was hurt and upset by the issues she had. maybe he didn’t get her, but he accepted that they had different tastes and ideas, and he tried to make it work for her. but she didn’t try. she didn’t want to try. she set him up to fail. and i feel like it was done on purpose.
so i don’t understand tim’s problem with swapnil. i’m reading things like tim was frustrated with him for being lazy, and the judges felt he wasn’t 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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 don’t think that would’ve 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. they’ve 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 swapnil’s 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 “the last person who stood up” 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 it’s not personal, and the show edits out their nasty racist gossip in the compilation of ‘proof’ 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 it’s 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. it’s 2015, you cannot say shit like “i don’t speak indian”, and no one has an issue with that. and once they cross into the later stages of the competition, they’re expendable. sandhya’s onesie from hell was bad, but one bad outfit doesn’t get you thrown out, especially if you’ve won multiple times like sandhya. yes, even at that stage it should’ve 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.
