Master stroke

Rahat Taslim won Rs 1 crore in KBC last year.

When Rahat Taslim, 38, was called to audition for the quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC), Season 4, she dialled her husband for permission to travel to Mumbai. “He was surprised at my request to travel alone, but also very irritated that I was positive about making it through the auditions,” she says. He hung up, but Taslim didn’t give up.

Ultimately Taslim, who is from Giridih in Jharkhand, won her husband over and booked her air ticket. “I had no money even to give the travel agent,” she says. “I paid later.” Her children remained in Giridih, but her husband flew to Mumbai from Kochi, where he was posted.

On set, she wowed host Amitabh Bachchan with her poise. After she won, in November 2010, Bachchan wrote on his blog: “A simple woman, a Muslim from an unknown village, still under the social and conservative norms of the ‘purdah’, came out from her house stitching [sic] activities that earned her Rs 2,000-3,000 in order to run the house and made a crore of rupees. She never in her life had opened even a bank account, because of their meager earnings, had never seen the lakhs that came to her in the form of the zero’s [sic] on her cheque and had never ever imagined that she would get to the hot seat at KBC. But she did.”

Taslim says she was stumped by the touch-screen computers and by her fellow contestants, who were engineers or students appearing for competitive exams or teachers. “I always loved to study and had even prepared for the state civil service exams,” she says. “But I never took the exams, because my family did not want me to pursue a job.” She figured out the computers, and as she made her way to the hot seat on November 10, she was chatting with Bachchan.

The actor wrote: “She played like a master, knew most of the answers till she reached the 50 lakh [rupees] mark and then cracked the million dollar question. Never once did she flinch or express any fear of what she was getting into, once she reached the high numbers. [...] What a fantastic moment for the game. What a fantastic moment for women in our country that given an opportunity, [one of them] had the ability to shine like never before.”

While answering the question for Rs 1 crore, Taslim used up her two lifelines and thus opted out of the Rs 5 crore “jackpot” question. “I didn’t want to risk losing the money as I knew what it could do for my family,” she says. “As I kept winning the money all I could think was, now I can go back and repay my loans, give my children a better education, expand my stitching centre into a boutique and give some amount in charity.”

Now a celebrity in her town, Taslim is a regular chief guest at local schools, state ceremonies and in her neighbourhood. “The respect and admiration which I get from people because I won a crore of rupees purely on my knowledge,” she says, “is worth more than any prize money.”

(KBC 5 begins on August 15)