Did Indian Idol make a Mockery of Music?

Kumar Rahul Tiwary; 2 September 2012

I have been watching the sixth edition of popular TV show ‘Indian Idol’ which came on Sony channel every weekend. Just yesterday the current edition of the show has ended, with Vipul Mehta being selected as the winner. Vipul was my and my wife’s favorite and we were very happy that ultimately he won it (as we didn’t find the other two finalists as equally talented). The grand finale show was grander and better organized than the previous shows. Over the time even Indian Idol has been picking up things from other shows and events, like hosting celebrities and presenting theme based evenings. But one part of the final show forced us to shift in discomfort.

In one section of the final show, three contestants who had been previously eliminated during the auditions were invited to sing on the stage again. First of them was a young man who sang a Bhojpuri song, which the jury found curiously entertaining. The boy had a rustic charm in him and a superb confidence in whatever he was doing there. While he sang average if we talk about his singing, the judges and the anchors were more interested in the lyrics of the song which was like “tu lagawale lu jab lipistick… heele la Arah district…”, or “when you apply a lipstick, it shakes the whole Ara district”. They made him sing it repeatedly and enjoyed it aloud. Next, a boy from Assam came and raised an alarm through his aalaap. The boy looked so innocent and unaware of the realities about his singing quality. He sang with so much heart and genuineness that viewers should have got touched by his performance. But his singing was very poor on any scale and all through his singing, viewers and the judges alike kept laughing at it. The third man to come had a Muslim name and sang none better. He tried to sing in the voices of both a male and a female alternately and was pretty terrible with it. The judges and viewers alike again kept laughing at his singing, while the man seemed to be in a supernatural state where he was immune to any influence or discouragement. While this third singer was singing, the other two were watching him. In one snapshot, I saw both of them had their heads down… Did it finally sink into them what was happening with them on the stage?

Singers and musicians, like almost all artists, keep their art on very high moral and spiritual plane. While they are professionals, like so many other engineers, doctors and chartered accountants are, they do consider that their profession has a certain novelty attached with it. And why should not it be like that because unlike other sciences and skills, art is a naturally gifted skill by and large. You train someone to sing for his life and he may improve only marginally if he has not “got it inside him”. And there are great, good, bad and average singers, just like in any other profession. But have the good ones got a kind of right to laugh over and ridicule those who are not good at it? Any sensible answer would be in negation. If you don’t like someone’s singing, you can choose not to listen to him or you can give a negative feedback. As such there have been cases when chappals and rotten eggs have been thrown at artists who don’t go well with the audiences. But in all such cases the audience’s frustrations would be because they hadn’t expected the performance to be that bad. They didn’t pay to watch these bad performers and the organizers also didn’t invite the worst performers so that the audiences could throw eggs at them. Yet, I fail to understand how the judges and organizers of Indian Idol thought it was proper to “use” these three singers (if I can call them singers) to raise the TRP of the show.

It is one thing that these three guys sang pathetically and moved funnily during the auditions. Auditions are a mess anyway and you get birds of all feathers flying in all directions during them. You have to differentiate between a crow and a cuckoo by their actual performance. Then you choose a few promising ones and the actual competition starts. The judges and managers of Indian Idol season 6 knew after the auditions that these three guys were not good singers. They also knew, as it was clearly visible through the audition videos, that these guys didn’t have any idea how bad they were at singing. The innocent picture of the boy from Assam sitting on ground to take an aalaap still comes to my eyes and I feel sorry for him. The judges had made fun of these guys during the auditions too but it could still be digested given the pattern of the show. The contestants knew (from previous years’ auditions) what they were getting into. But to selectively invite the worst singers again at the stage of grand finale where you are in moments going to declare the best singer as “Indian Idol”, and then to shower them with ridicule and laugh at their singing while they themselves are naïve enough to be unaware of what is happening, is not this a kind of mockery of music as a whole?

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization associated with the author. There is no attempt to hurt the feelings or sensibilities of any person or organization. You are most welcomed to express your opinion, views and feedback on this article.