Shas­tri Boodan

Devashish Ram­dath is the first ever In­de­pen­dence Clas­si­cal Singing champ.

Ram­dath took home the $25,000 prize and Pun­dit Ma­hase Ma­haraj tro­phy on Sun­day at the fi­nals of the com­pe­ti­tion that came off at the Cou­va South Au­di­to­ri­um at Cam­den Road.

The fi­nals saw eleven par­tic­i­pants de­liv­er­ing a rich mix of In­di­an Clas­si­cal songs to a pan­el of six judges.

Af­ter col­lect­ing his cheque and tro­phy Ram­dath poured the prais­es on to his par­ents. He said with­out the sup­port of his par­ents he would not have achieved any suc­cess in life.

Pun­dit Ma­hase Ma­haraj was al­so on hand to de­liv­er the tro­phy. Ma­haraj is a leg­endary vet­er­an com­pos­er who wrote sev­er­al time­less In­di­an Clas­si­cal songs as Ra­jin­der Jeem Jeem, that was made pop­u­lar by Adesh Sama­roo a few years ago when he sang a cov­er ver­sion.

The show start­ed at 5 pm and fea­tured sea­soned vet­er­ans in the genre as well as new voic­es. The Peo­ple’s Choice award of $10,000 went to Ramesh Bas­deo. The Best Drum­mer Prize was won by Shiv­anand Bas­deo and Sunil Seecha­ran won the award for Best Dhan­talist. There was on­ly a grand prize win­ner and no sec­ond or third place awards.

Su­ru­jdeo Man­ga­roo, the ex­ec­u­tive pro­duc­er and spokesman for NeeLee­Ji Events, the or­gan­i­sa­tion stag­ing the show, said state spon­sor­ship was the hard­est thing to get. He said, “The gov­ern­ment is spend­ing over $7 mil­lion in events to cel­e­brate our coun­try’s 60th an­niver­sary of In­de­pen­dence and they cast on­ly pep­per­corns at In­di­an cul­ture. We have been liv­ing in this coun­try for 177 years and we are part of the land yet our cul­ture is treat­ed as alien. Why does the gov­ern­ment con­tin­ue to side­line In­di­an cul­ture this way, we too, cel­e­brate the In­de­pen­dence of T&T be­cause we are cit­i­zens of this coun­try.”