New Delhi, September 09: As an audience, I’ve enjoyed watching them shout, sulk and sing. As a journalist, I’ve viewed their playing-to-the-camera antics with scepticism. But to judge a talent hunt was something else. So, when the host of Amul Star Voice of India, Shaan, announced my name as a guest journalist judge at a preview performance on the show’s sets at Film City recently, my first reaction was, “Not me”.

I flanked myself where sits the show’s lone lady judge ‘Alkaji’; the middle seat had a bit more shielding. For starters, I wasn’t exactly dressed for the arc lights—a Primark T-shirt over Louis Philippe trousers and chappals. Shaan’s affixing a ‘ji’ to my name didn’t help either.

But the channel’s googly wasn’t a random call. “We wanted the journalists to realise how difficult it is for judges to choose,” Star Plus’ marketing and communication head, Prem Kamath, informed.

Opening singer Mohammed Irfan was a delight in a song from Life in a Metro. But while the senior judges delved at length on his singing nuances, I opted for the oft-heard, non-dramatic: “You are a rock star.” Was quoting a cliché akin to a bad debut? Not exactly, since both Irfan and Shaan reacted with ample glee. Maybe, a better one-liner for the next, I wondered, when my chatty co-judge on the left suggested I listen with my headphones on. Recalling the uncomfortable sight of judges fiddling with their headphones, I tried wearing mine and predictably got busy stopping it from a slip down embarrassment.

The next performer, Abhilasha, sang a golden oldie Tu chanda main chandni. Impressed, I began, “You have a melodious voice”. But a judge on the right nudged, “But I thought she was shrill. You should have heard her without the headphones.”

As the number of performances increased, we were fine-tuning our judging acts and our bytes too.

The flip side of being in the middle of a panel is that you never get to start the feedback with the disadvantage of sounding me-too. So when the real-life Shaan fan, Delhi’s Ishmeet, next finished singing Tune mujhe pehchana nahin, I pronto declared, “I couldn’t differentiate between the original and his performance.” Quite the ultimate compliment, I thought, for a performance that had touched me. However, the judge, who followed next, kind of dampened Ishmeet’s spreading glee stating: “Don’t take it as a compliment; what he meant was that it’s important that you have your own voice,” with Shaan nodding an encore. Please, that’s not what I had meant, but then, there are no second takes on reality TV.

Moral of my outing—no five people can have one opinion, and being a judge on a reality show, even if trifle sub-consciously, is no less a performance for the judge than that of the contestant.