Magic Tin Chakar Taroka (Magic Three-Wheeler Star) or Tin Chaka (Three- Wheeler) is a reality competition to find music talent exclusively from the urban poor of Dhaka city. This programme was shown on Bangladeshi satellite television in 2008. The present article is an ethnographic exploration of the Tin Chaka event which demonstrates how the cultural identity of the urban poor in Dhaka has been performed by the production of ordinary celebrities in the visual media. In doing so, a combination of on-screen and off-screen observations were undertaken for a period of six months which was complemented by semiological interpretation of adverts, jingles and other visual materials. In this article, I argue that, despite its admirable inclusivity and thereby remarkably instant acceptance by the audience, the reason behind the discontinuation of Tin Chaka in following years lies in the inscriptions of the show as a charitable undertaking, an act which has often been performed in the reality television programmes in the name of “democratisation”.

中文翻译：

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不守规矩的木偶：在孟加拉国电视偶像比赛中培养城市贫民

Magic Tin Chakar Taroka（魔术三​​轮车之星）或 Tin Chaka（三轮车）是一项真人秀比赛，旨在从达卡市的城市贫民中寻找音乐人才。该节目于 2008 年在孟加拉国卫星电视上播出。本文是对 Tin Chaka 事件的民族志探索，展示了达卡城市贫民的文化身份是如何通过视觉媒体中的普通名人产生的。在此过程中，在六个月的时间里进行了屏幕上和屏幕外观察的组合，并辅以对广告、广告歌曲和其他视觉材料的符号学解释。在这篇文章中，我认为，尽管它具有令人钦佩的包容性并因此被观众迅速接受，