VJ Cyrus Sahukar is hosting a speed dating show Elovator Pitch, which gives a fresh and quirky definition of love, says Ayushi Sharma

Endless ballads are written for it. Poets wax eloquent about it. But love continues to be elusive for many of us. All of us fall in love, but how many of us understand its true meaning? Bollywood actor and VJ, Cyrus Sahukar is hosting a speed dating show Elovator Pitch, which gives a fresh and quirky definition of love on MTV.

The show has 10 boys on 10 floors and a girl travelling up the elevator (hence the name Elovator Pitch). On every floor, the girl on her way up encounters one man who tries to woo her in the limited time. After she has met all 10, the girl must shortlist three boys out of the lot and decide to go on a date with one. Likewise, 10 girls await a boy on every floor for a chance to woo him.

Cyrus says, “The show is completely irreverent. There are no tasks, no fights, no moments of dramatic ups and downs. The contestants only get that much of time which the elevator takes to reach from one floor to another. It’s a speed dating experience and I find it interesting because it’s almost like a social experiment. Both the boys and girls have around 30 seconds to come up with stuff. Sometimes most bizarre truths come out and sometimes most ridiculous things happens.”

Adding further, he avers, “My relationship with MTV has been more than a decade old now. It feels like family to me. Elevator Pitch will surely set a different trend amongst the youngsters I’m witnessing some great pitches by the boys. I’m confident that I will learn many different ways of wooing the girls!”

The show incorporates humour and fun and this is what is missing from other dating shows, which majorly focus on love or relationships which are portrayed seriously.

“Here none of those are important except funny characters and bizarre experiences. Eventually the best that is going to come out is two people ending up on a date,” says Cyrus.

Cyrus strongly agrees that there’s no social relevance of these shows but believes that is where the magic lies. In a day and age like today where everything is so spread out, where people don’t necessarily know what they want but they definitely are sure of what they don’t want. These type of shows deal with different people and different aspects of life.

Acting and hosting exist parallely for Cyrus.

He explains, “Being a host is a completely different job from acting. The host is primarily a person who has to have their personality speaking up for themselves whereas acting is about not necessarily being yourself but playing a character and I have tried to keep both alive. I have always kept them apart from each other. And because of that I have had a career that is very colourful.”

“My hosting life has been very busy. But when it comes to the acting life, two years ago I decided that I wanted to explore theatre so I did one play, Trivial Disasters which had eight urban stories from different walks of life, directed by Atul Kumar. It had Kalki Koechlin, Richa Chadda and Purab Kohli also,” he adds.

The definition of love has dramatically changed. This is the century for self love. The actor says, “Today we live in an age where relationships are very tough to sustain as people’s wants and desires have evolved. It is a big change because our options have changed. Love will never be completely out of fashion and it will always exist. It’s just that that the forms of love have changed. Earlier there was hype about getting married, but today you can see marriage is not that important. The way that they love I viewed had changed but love itself will never really change.”