Wattal redefines Indian Idol
Nirupama Dutt

One success story of a poor little boy of Punjab with a song in his soul is all too well known. He was a boy called Pheeto, son of a revered barber, in Kotla Sultan Singh village near Amritsar. Not bothered about studying, he would roam the village singing in the pre-Independence years. The wise father apprenticed him at his uncle’s hair-cutting saloon at Lahore. The lad while giving a manicure to music director Ghulam Hyder was humming softly. Hyder gave him his first break and we remember him today as Mohammad Rafi.

This spring, it seemed that Saraswati was smiling in a techno-savvy yet benevolent way on another son of the soil. A whitewash worker called Ravinder Ravi seemed all set to sing in Indian Idol, a popular television show. The typical fan reaction for this singer of the working class was: "The judges are brutally harsh with him. The hosts ridicule him and do not miss the opportunity to direct barbed comments at him. Fellow contestants appear to keep away from him. Untrained, he does not have the conventional good looks nor does he conform to the glamour industry’s standards of smartness. With such odds against them, ordinary people would have broken down or would have taken the escape route. This guy has carried on with a mixture of grit, determination and humility. If the organisers wanted a singer performer, they should have named their programme ‘Indian Singer’ but if it is the Indian idol they are looking for, Ravi deserves to be there."

The judges thought differently and untrained and untutored as he was, Ravi still made it to the top five. Even if the one crore from Sony Television was not to be his, yet he won the love of the people, musical programmes in small cities and bade goodbye forever to laborious whitewashing days. Ravi is now struggling it out in Mumbai. But the latest news is that Jawhar Wattal, the whiz kid of popular music, has decided to launch his album. This could be just the break that Ravi required, as music director Wattal has brought out hits like Shubha Mudgal’s Ali More Angana, Hansraj Hans’ Jhanjhar, Daler Mehndi’s Bolo Ta Ra Ra and many others. Wattal’s name was synonymous with hit albums in the nineties but then for some years personal losses in the form of death and illness of his dear ones pushed him into the background.

Wattal is critical of the prevalent Indipop scene and feels most remixes are horrendous. "There are few original tracks and all what one is hearing these days are pathetic makeovers," says Wattal. When asked if the singer is above the song, he says: "No first there is the song and then the singer." The question that looms large is: Will there be such a song for the Ludhiana-bred Ravi? One hopes that the Wattal-Ravi combination works and after all there ios just one letter that is different in Rafi and Ravi.