confused iconoclast

Reportedly, Sonu Nigam's gone ballistic (note: in true Mumbai Mirror tradition, this link might cease to function after a random point in time in the future) on a recently shot episode for Indian Idol because he didn't approve of the songs that Sony had asked the contestants to sing. The song choices at the receiving end were zubi zubi (Bappi's Brother Louie rip-off) and R D Burman's tuu ruuThaa to mai.n from Jawani.

I have been unhappy over the selection of songs for some time now, but this time around it was particularly bad. Looks, make-up and the other factors can be worked on, but the ultimate criterion in a music contest is the voice. There are millions of good-looking girls and boys, but there are just a handful of people who can sing well. What is the difference between a common singer and an Indian Idol then? I definitely agree that an Indian Idol should be selected in totality. But the music aspect needs to be given attention too. It simply cannot take a backseat. We have to give these aspiring singers challenging songs to test their talents.

This dude's confused. Sa Re Ga Ma (Pa) was clearly more about singing than any of these other dress-well-get-a-makeover-sashay-away talent[sic] searches like Indian Idol and Fame Gurukul. Given that these last two shows focus on so much more than musical prowess, why're you so concerned if they choose songs that are "easy"? It's called breadth coverage, and if you can't deal with it, stop being one of the judges; Return to SRGM(P) and help restore it to being the great platform for new singing talent it used to be.

I hope some contestant chooses jaaved bhaaii so rele on a future episode.

Jan 31, 2006: Here's a brief HOWTO to get to the article (some steps might be omitted for reduced user interaction; however, for the purposes of this discussion, getting to the frigging page supersedes brevity):

1. Go to the Advanced Search page


2. Type in "Sonu Nigam" (retain the space, remove the quotes) in the first textbox (which is labelled "Search by keywords:")


3. In the list box labelled "Choose a section to search:", scroll down till you see "Entertainment" and click it


4. The next two entries labelled "From:" and "To:" allow you to specify a date range. You're thinking of typing in the range directly, aren't you? Forget it! See that calendar icon to the right of the textbox in each case? Clicking that brings up a calendar. Make sure the month is January 2006 and the date is 30. This should give you "30-01-2006" in each textbox (without the quotes, of course).


5. Click that red button labelled "Search"


6. This should return a result titled "Sonu Nigam miffed". Click the hyperlinked word "More" that brings up the tail of the extract, and you should be taken to the article sporting an imaginative photograph of said miffed individual

Note that in all likelihood, this page will become inaccessible after its archived version falls off the lower bound of the time window they let you run searches over. You can either wait till then or just head over to their offices now and defenestrate the doofus responsible for designing such a painful portal.