Is Indian Idol trying to generate interest by creating controversies?

Is Indian Idol making a fool of all of us? Could all this tamasha about guest judges being asked to make only favourable comments about the contestants be a ruse to boost the TRPs? A source very close to the show who is also an expert on reality television says these ongoing controversies are self-generated.

“Suddenly you have contestants being pulled up for being not good enough; you have judges pulled up for not being honest enough. These are all planned gimmicks,” the source informs me adding, “The platform is open to many interpretations on how contestants should be judged. First there was a judge, singer Amit Kumar claiming he was instructed to say only good things about the contestants. You now have a lyricist (Manoj Muntashir) criticizing Amit Kumar for talking against the show. It’s all a cleanly designed spiral of publicity.”

I asked host Aditya Narayan once and for all if the guest judges are asked to make only favourable comments about the contestants, Aditya replied, “No, they are not.”

It is common practice on music reality shows to generate controversies when there are none. In 2019 the internet was ablaze with a story on Adnan Sami and Armaan Malik indulging in a spat on the sets of the talent-hunt show The Voice where they both serve as a judge. The truth is, there was no such incident at all on the sets of the show.

Adnan spoke to me and called the whole incident a figment of the PR team’s imagination. “One morning they decided to boost the TRPs of the show (The Voice). So what do they do? They decide to plant a manufactured war between the two most popular judges of the show. Shockingly, Adnan Sami and Armaan Malik were not taken into confidence, probably because those who created this work of sickening fiction knew their idea would be nipped in the bud if either of the two came to know of the planned publicity gimmick.

And that’s exactly what happened when Adnan and Armaan came to know of their war on the sets.

Said Adnan, “Armaan and I were shooting for the show when the story broke out. We were aghast. And livid. There was never any hostility between us. Armaan respects me too much to even talk loudly in my presence. It didn’t take us long to know where the made-up story came from. We were even told to ‘lie low and not comment’.”

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