Objection, my Lord!

Watching Antakshari has become an addiction now. If nothing else, I watch every episode of Antakshari without fail. I am so engulfed in it, I find myself humming songs and checking whether I am singing the right words. Gosh! Since when did I start worrying about singing the right words?

The theme of the show is quite good. They invite teams from four different zones: north, west, east and central. Wonder why south is missing! Guess we are not worthy enough. Anyways, so these teams fight it out on the show, flaunting off their singing skills and their filmi knowledge. One team gets out on Friday. The remaining three teams fight on Saturday and two teams move on to the third and concluding episode on Sunday. The team who wins on Sunday is the weekly winner (and wins a whopping one lakh cash prize) and plays again next week. Three new teams from three zones enter the war field and this continues ad infinitum.

The rounds they play are interesting. The standard identify-tune-and-sing-the-song is of course there on all three days. One round has a celebrity singer playing antaras (paragraphas) and the teams need to identify the song and sing the mukhda. See the visual clue and identify the song is another round. Try to identify the movie which Juhi (the hostess) tries hard to enact and then sing a song. So, the rounds are quite interesting. What stands out particularly in few of the rounds is the presense of objections. If a team is singing and any other team thinks they are singing it wrong (could be the wrong song or just a wrong word), then the team can raise an objection. Then, the objecting team will be given a chance to sing the song correctly and if they do, then they gain points. This round especially scares the hell out of novices. I used to love this round initially, because this made sure the song is sung right and not just filled in with any words. Now, I find this absolutely silly.

Teams have found out that this is where they can gain points easily. The team which actually identifies the right song (by either listening to the tune or watching the visual clue) and starts singing. No sooner have they finished, a team objects. What is the objection? You didn’t sing the ling twice! Is this even an objection? If a word is wrong, then go ahead and set it right. The team has proved its knowledge by identifying the song and singing it right. The fact that they sang the line once means that they can sing the line again. The team which couldn’t identify the song on time raises a silly objection and takes away the points. The team (which should get due credit) which was capable of identifying the song and singing it, lose points!

Teams raise such silly objections. This is where strong teams lose points and weak ones gain at the cost of the strong team. It’s time the Antakshari team realized that the objection round is getting sillier day by day. Either remove it, or define valid objections and stick to only those. There is a saying. “Thoe who can do, do. Those who can’t, teach.” For Antakshari teams, I would like to change this to: “Those who can sing, sing. Those who can’t, object.”