Now where have we heard this before? Wasn’t a similar explanation given for inducting Shilpa Shetty into the Big Brother house in the UK? And didn’t that particular event also spark off a huge brouhaha, albeit over the serious issue of racism? Is it a mere coincidence? Or is there more to the story than meets the eye?

Regular viewers of American Idol will be familiar with the mechanics of the competition. Three judges, including an acid-tongued Britisher, set the standards while the public gets to vote for their favourites. With thirty million votes coming in, the show can lay claim to being an almost parallel democratic process. And to a large extent there is a sense of equal opportunity: fat, thin, white, coloured, rich, poor, pretty, nerdy — past frontrunners have included all these. The year President George Bush was re-elected, the winner on American Idol was an African-American unwed mother called Fantasia Barrino.

Underneath the patina of equality however, the tensions simmer. They surface in subtle ways, in comments about a contestant’s dress sense, for instance, or the fact that a representative of a small ethnic minority — if s/he were to make it past the auditions — would seem unlikely to win. (A professor of economics in Arkansas studied the results and concluded that voters were likely to prefer contestants of their own race).

Against this backdrop, the Sanjaya trajectory comes across as unusual. To begin with, it is significant that the singer was consistently cast as ‘Indian’ even though he is part Italian-American. His knowledge of classical music and his affection for his sister — who lost out in the early rounds of the competition — seemed to sustain the notion of heritage and family values while other facts put out about him — such as the fact that he sang in a gospel choir and had grown up in America — made him appear to be a well behaved and well integrated teenager. In a matter of days, as his performance dropped, however, all these qualities were of no avail. Judges dismissed him summarily, the likes of Stern and Votefortheworst.com adopted him. From respectable citizen he became the funny odd guy — a Peter Sellers with hair.

... contd.