When I returned to my hometown, Siliguri, from a long stay abroad this summer, one of the first changes I noticed was the attitude of the young Nepali man who drives our car. Two things caught my attention: a silver ring with the letter 'P' on his left hand, and a little sticker that he had pasted on the centre of the steering wheel. Dawa knew that I hated stickers being glued to my car, and yet he had allowed himself this indulgence.
I, diffidently, investigated from the rear seat: Vote for Prashant Tamang, read the sticker. It did not take me long to find out who Prashant Tamang was. From the Bagdogra airport to Siliguri, there were posters of the Nepali Indian Idol contestant everywhere – glued to tree trunks and lampposts, on hoardings next to Shahrukh Khan, on car rears and house fronts in Gurungbasti, a locality with a pronounced Nepali population. For the next several days, everywhere I went Prashant's face followed me, and with him, a trail of numbers – 52525, an incantation that seemed to have hypnotised my town and its neighbours. I began to hear stories of local patriots, of young men staying awake all night long, not at defence outposts or research laboratories, but at temporary telephone booths, erected by benevolent telephone companies and shrewd politicians, hungry for proxy votes.
It was these stories that propelled me, finally, to tune in to Indian Idol. Over the next few Fridays, I watched, with the incredulity of a tourist watching a crumbling monument, as good singers were regularly voted off of the show. I began to concur with the media pundit Amit Varma's argument that gender was an important parameter in the show's voting patterns, with men voting for men whom they find unthreatening, and women voting for men they find 'cute' or 'attractive'. When I arrived in Siliguri, only Prashant Tamang (a Nepali from Darjeeling) and Amit Paul (a Nepali-Khasi from Shillong) remained, having been voted into the final round by viewers from the Indian Northeast.
I have lived in a small town most of my life, and I understand its pretzel-natured aspirations. I know that we hunt for heroes even in shadows; that we are happy to see a neighbour singing in a chorus; that we are waiting to clap for anyone who shares our accent. At the moment, Prashant and Amit are small-town India's poster-boys, young men who help us to see our best profiles in the mirror. A contest like Indian Idol is the small-towner's 'limited offer' ticket to an equal-opportunity stadium. But it is difficult to see any show as a true talent-hunt contest if it bases its tests of merit on a community's finger-tapping efficiencies and spare-fund-collecting abilities. This says something about our insecurities as communities, as well as our consciousness of belonging to that virtual reality called the Indian nation.