Posted:
Perhaps some of you may have watched the mega finals of Saregama Lil Champs on Zee Marathi yesterday. This program has been very well appreciated in Maharashtra and there are quite a few things that the Hindi Saregamapa producers could learn from the success of Zee Marathi Lil champs program.
1. The winner was not chosen by SMS votes alone, but by a combination of SMS votes and selection by a jury of 5 eminent singers/composers. This system allows viewers to have a say in the results and also helps to blunt the effect of regional biase in SMS voting. If SRGMP Hindi producers and mobile phone service providers sacrifice some of their greed, then this will make the Hindi version more meaningful too!
2. Participants were not encouraged just to sing recent songs only. Many of the songs sung were old ones and were well appreciated by the audience. Mentors on Zee Hindi Saregamapa have been trying to project that singers who sing oldy type songs cannot sing the new ones and for this reason? I question the sanity of this idea. We have had many singers (like Rafi, Asha, Kishore Kumar etc etc) who were versatile and equally good at singing sad songs and peppy songs!
3. Most of the senior singers/composers encouraged young singers to focus on learning at least the basics of classical singing. Suresh Wadkar had even mentioned on SRGMP Hindi show that a classical singer can easily sing western songs too. I agree with this thinking. A classic example to justify this view is Shubha Mudgal - a hard core classical singer who proved that she is good at pop too!\
These are some things that producers of Hindi Saregamapa can learn to reduce the nautanki element in the program which seems to be spreading like wild fire!
Inspite of the fact that Hindi film industry and music is different from regional music market like for Marathi music, people in India in general have an ear for traditional music and there is no reason to feel Saregamapa would become less popular if it shifts its focus at least to some extent towards our traditional forms of music.
