Skip to main content

The Prodigy

The news of her reaching the finals of a singing competition did not come as any surprise to anybody. She was gifted with a voice which her friends in her high school were jealous of. She won all singing competitions in the school. She won all singing competitions in the locality. She had been singing since she was 3 or maybe since she was 2. Even she didn't remember since when she was singing. She just dreamt of making it big in singing, and maybe one day she would have many super hit music albums to her name. Her dream was to be the biggest singing sensation in the country. She dreamt of giving autographs to people wherever she went. In fact, she had practiced different styles and zeroed in on what autograph she would give once she was famous. As of now she had to clear the last hurdle before giving a shot to becoming a singing sensation

The Talent Hunt show was being aired at a prime time slot at a premier TV channel. It had 3 stages before the finals with participants being eliminated at each stage. The final round had 10 contestants and was supposed to be aired for four weekends. The participants were supposed to exhibit their singing talents in front of judges, who were the famous singers and music directors of the Bollywood. No historinics expected. They had to come on stage, sing and hope that judges shower truckloads of praise on them and the audience vote for them through SMS. Maybe a few lines about themselves might help voters decide upon whom to vote. After all, they needed to know about person whom they would be voting for. Apart from that few lines about the show, their expectations from the show etc would have been more than sufficient. No role of fake emotions, region to which contestant belonged, religion, caste or any other details. Just pure talent. After all, this show was different from any other talent hunt show. This was the only show that selected winners based upon talent. Other talent hunt show were nothing but sham!


The preparations consisted of rehearsing for hours together. She had to also prepare her introduction and answers to some random questions that could be posed to her. Her mother did not want her to look awkward as compared to other urbane contestants. After all, she had come so far and a win here would lead to opening of floodgates to her dreams, her destiny. The last thing she would wish would be to get eliminated even after performing well. With all the preparations, she went to the preliminaries. The preliminaries came as a big jolt to her chances. Not that she didn't perform well. But then, there were 9 others, all equally talented and all competing for that coveted spot. She would be competing for next few days with the best singers. A loss here would be a heartbreak. In the first round of the finals, one of the judge was not that forgiving as she would have liked. He kept quarreling with other judges who seemed quite impressed with her, at the end of which he just bluntly stated - "You don't have control over your pitch. With this you can expect nothing in the music industry".

That was like a heartbreak.

For the first time in the competition she risked getting eliminated. Thankfully, there were no eliminations in the last stage when there were only 10 contestants left. This show was, after all quite different from other shows. The producers wanted to disappoint nobody! Still, she ranked seventh int he first round of polls. But all was not lost. She had 3 more rounds to bounce back. But that would require her to showcase something more than singing talent. Maybe, her singing didn't connect her well with the voting audience. Somehow, that emotional connect was missing. She needed to work on this. Yes, next week she would perform much better. Her mom came up with an idea. She realized that it is often the audience who votes. Ultimately it may not be so discerning about who is slightly better than whom. Maybe, there can be some other techniques to win. What about making an emotional pitch?

Next week came and she sang well, as did the others. But this time, some other judge was unforgiving. The real talent lied in overcoming these hurdles and connecting with the audience. And she hit bang on! A bit of smile smile, followed by some crib and lots of tears proved to be a trump card. In a week her rankings jumped to third. Now the competition was extremely intense. The top two were equally adept in making emotional appeals to the audience. The penultimate round saw no change in top three ranks. Now winning was a herculean task.

Maybe, some luck on her side ... or maybe a quick analysis would help. Then came one of the eureka moment when she realized that she was the only one from that part of the country. Maybe, that vote bank would help. She could easily make emotional appeals pertaining to that region. Perhaps her parents would help her in her endeavour. The top two contestants couldn't make such appeal. Both of them were from Mumbai. They would eat into each other's votes, and in the process she would gain. She just needed to apply herself well, and leave the rest to the public, which was after all the best judge, mature enough to decide who was the best.

The trick clicked. She had won. She became the first among equals. That was her ticket to stardom. She couldn't believe this. She could see her on covers of music albums, on stage performing with the likes of AR Rahman. Her career was ready to take off. She was into the big league now

In a year's time when would have her first music album. She would record few more songs before her career would begin to fizzle out. Then, there would be a new star coming from a even more rigorous contest. But by then, someone else would have noticed her talents and she would rule the small screen as a actor, courtesy few soaps with some strange spellings and surprisingly, all starting with alphabet 'K'. After all, she had the power to move people!

Comments

  1. Unbelievable! The prodigy got 2nd place on a list of the best banned videos ever! You guys should check this out, I just found it! http://www.weshow.com/top10/en/music/top-10-banned-music-videos

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Shop @ Amazon

Popular posts from this blog

An area of darkness ?

The title of this post finds its origins in a novel with simlar name written by VS Naipaul. Set in India, some 40 years ago or so, this is a kind of travelogue of author's brief stay in India where he found it to be full of superstitions, ignorance and darkness! Many decades and many MNCs and malls later, few parts of India seemed to have chucked off that tag, but there are many places that haven't and continue to remain shrouded in ignorance. Move few hours away from a city, travel in a second class train compartment or a dilapidated state transport bus and you get to see the dark underbelly of India Shining. As one of the characters in the movie Rang De Basanti says "Yahan zinda rehne ki jung mein logo ki zindagiyan nikal jaati hai" . So true it seems! My day today was spent being kind of lost in similar thoughts. To start with, I when I boarded the ST bus, a woman was wailing. She may be in her 20s or something, but she was crying in some peculiar musical tone. At...

The Detour

The 7 year old girl walked from school to her home. This was the first time she was walking alone on that route. On any other day, her mother would have gone to pick her up from school, but not that day. She was not aware that schools were declaring holiday an hour and a half earlier due to trouble in the town owing to some agitations and protests. Only few parents could be intimated about this. A friend’s mother accompanied her to the lane leading to her apartment, from where it was just a minute’s walk. But that day, for some unknown reason she decided to roam about a bit and take the longer route. It is not always that she gets to roam about, and no one would know about it. After all she wouldn’t tell her mamma about that. The road was almost deserted. It was usually the case around the noon time in this part of the country. She walked ahead leisurely, singing and dancing all along as if she owned the road. But this was short lived. In couple of minutes, the scene changed....

Cycle

After a failed attempt at jogging, I roamed about aimlessly when an idea struck me to have a ride in a cycle, couple of which is lying in the “recreational area”. I was longing since long to ride a cycle sans motor. There was no particular reason for this feeling; it was that just I wanted to have a ride. The 2-3 km ride was a tiring experience, especially for one who is having this after a long time; but I was gleeing all along. As an infant, I loved going about in a tricycle. Then I became too big for it and got a cycle. After several attempts and many falls, I mastered the art. I used to flaunt it in front of my friends, who flaunted theirs. As I entered teens, the bicycle seemed smaller; so I got a bigger cycle. As years progressed, I learnt to ride a 2 wheeler. Now I started to find the bicycle too childish for my tastes. I tried to reason out why I should get a 2-wheeler to go to a particular place. Sometimes I succeeded to get it, and sometimes I didn’t and had to go around in...

The Forest

The Toyota Qualis and the Chvrolet Tavera stopped after a long journey. It was almost 9 in the night and it was pitch-dark. Night times in a forest are always pitch-dark. Adding to that it was a good `thirteen days since the last full moon day. Adding to this, the cloudy weather made visibility close to zero. Later in the night the forest would be engulfed in a fog making it nearly impossible to see. The only noise audible was that of silence, few random insects and that of a train going at a distance. After a long journey they all were quite weary and all they wanted was some rest so that the next day morning they can head for tiger and rhino spotting among many other species of flora and fauna in the wildlife sanctuary. Right now it was time for some parathas, maggi and booze. All fifteen of them headed for the cottage which they had booked, sat near the fire place relishing food, chit chatting about college life, universe and everything. But chit chatting wasn’t what they came ...

K-eediyot box

(Disclaimer - Please do not think that I don't know spellings ... my numerologist told to use the above spelling for eediyot and add a k before it, this will help generate more TRP and comments for the blog) Time 7 : 30 - 8 PM, 8 - 8 : 30 PM .... 10 : 30 - 11 PM Venue - Zee TV, Star Plus, Sony entertainment etc. etc. Figure this - A family drawing room belonging to an extremely rich business house occupied with a mixture of emotional and scheming characters - 1 saas, 2 bahus, 1 son (+1 who makes an entry unaware of what is happening), 2 random distant relatives, 3 random cousins, all mouthing dialogues that have earlier been said by actors ranging from Nirupa Roy to Rajesh Khanna, followed by a long silence, 13 camera angles for same scene (top view, side view, cross sectional view, lateral view, 45 degree elevation view) , flashbacks and memories that last few episodes, good people becoming evil, evil people actually being un-evil, rebirths, amnesia, a background score that often ...