Judge Jawaman

I have obviously not become a judge in a Court of Law nor am I suggesting that I have aspirations to become one. I only wanted to share with you my experiences as a Judge in a Talent competition along the lines of American Idol and its numerous clones across the world.

The business unit I belong to in my office, recently held celebrations for reaching an employee strength of 10000. As part of these celebrations, the aforementioned Talent competition was also held. But when the event was about to start, the organizers realized that they fell short by 2 judges in a panel of 3. They were able to rope in one and this person (my ex-boss) goaded me into filling out the remaining vacancy.

I resisted the option of becoming a Judge and that too in a talent competition, but then I quickly realized that the chances of me ever donning that role again were lower than that of Raul Vinci
ever saying that LeT was a bigger threat to India than “Hindu Terrorism”.

So, I trudged along to the venue where the competition was being held. There, the organizers gave me a sheet with some 11 names listed along with the talent that they were going to exhibit. As is a norm in all these talent shows, most of them were going to sing. There was one person who was going to whistle, one who would dance, one person who listed his talent as boom box and one other person, who was going to do mimicry.

But I started getting the jitters more than the participants. Music and me are probably as far away as Karunanidhi and Integrity. So how was I going to judge from a group of people whose primary talent is singing? Then I told myself that if I could actually do the performance appraisal of those who work under me, without knowing the details of how they worked, this evaluation in a talent show should be easy.

Thankfully, the organizers had given 3 main sections against which the judges could mark the ratings and then arrive at a total. I don't even remember the categories now, but I went on and added few more of my own! I can assure that “good looking” was not one of them, because the only good looking girl in the fray didn't win anything.

Before I proceed further, I must also admit that I am not a big fan of these competitions. I somehow find them to be extremely boring and feel that the singers quite often only ape the original singer of the song. Moreover, some people have talent and desire, but the output is not in a refined state to be exhibited in public. So, I generally avoid watching these shows on TV and honestly feel that they are a waste of time. If I want to enjoy a song, I would rather hear;view the original.

Anyways, the event started and performer after performer came up to the stage to do their routine. When all of us judges compared the scores we had come up with, I found that all of us were pretty much on the same rating – not in the exact points awarded, but in the relative ranking of the individuals. I wont say that the other judges were as bad as me, because I know for sure that the judge who dragged me into this event was quite knowledgeable in such things, though I don't know much about the other judge.

Coming to the talents on display – the top two singers were really way above the rest. And there was no dearth for comedy elements in the event – though it was like a Vijayakanth movie where the makers are quite serious in their presentation, but the whole thing is a big joke to the audience. Topping this list of talents was the guy who said “boom box”. I thought that he was going to to play some instrument, but the guy came on stage and started mouthing some “beats” in famous songs, similar to what Vijaya T.Rajendar does with so much passion, like in this video. The guy who said he was going to do some mimicry then came up to us and said that he wanted to sing! And when he sang, he gave such long pauses between stanzas that I actually wanted to go out and get fresh set of cotton wads to plug my ears. To top it, he sang 2 songs!

I also noticed that most singers seemed to close their eyes while singing and quite often, they even squeeze this closed eye while trying to sing some difficult portion. I wonder, every time, that their eyeballs may actually pop into their skull.

That, in brief, is my experience as a Judge in a Talent competition.