ClicksandWrites

Jeetu – A promising singer from Mumbai

Posted on July 17, 2008 Updated on June 6, 2015

Amrita TV has recently concluded one of it’s prestigious Reality show which had a tough competition all throughout amongst the contestants and it’s active followers. You may not have witnessed a massive swing of fortunes and votes even in the lok sabha polls but that was the case amongst the scores of SMS votes for the last 3 contestants during the final day of this programme. All throughout the show, we were ecstatic and supported all the contestants but with awe watched the progress of a honest, moderately speaking and very hard working Mumbaikar boy, originally from Triprayar of Thrissur District. Due to his natural style and open attitude to acknowledge his limitations he was liked and disliked by many and also happened to fall under my mischievous eyes which even prompted me to create a whole new set of cartoon based on the Super Star Global. Obviously in most of them, he happened to be the main character. We have seen that the finals of such reality shows are always a surprise and at the end of the show both the winner and losers will have plenty of stories to say with regards to their journey till then.

Out of my passion to promote these talents who took an effort to give us some memorable months of musical fun and festivity and also as a TQM activity to see that they are not left aside, I approached Jeetu and his family for a short session with me. I had several questions running in my mind when I approached them as throughout the show I have been constructively criticising him and showering him only limited complements through my write-ups as well as cartoon series and was not sure about the direct reactions towards me for such an attempt. All those apprehensions melted down when I communicated and today, I am presenting to you all to read about Jeetendranath Ramachandran alisa Jeetu:

Greetings to you Jeetu. You have been one of the finalists of the recently concluded Super Star Global programme conducted by Amrita TV. It was a close finish and almost a sure winner for the title, last minute swing of votes resulted in you reaching the 2nd position. However, when we look at it, overall it gave a feast to all the music lovers and the contestants. It is the same interest of these music lovers that made me now approach you for a brief and casual talk to find how your progress is after the post-elimination from this show.

1. Jeetu, congratulations for participating in the Super Star Global Competition and getting selected to the top 3 level. How did you hear about this programme?

From amrita tv ads.

2. How did you find the different stages of the competition? Particularly on the challenges thrown to you to perform various dance and duet rounds?

Challenges are part of realty shows. To be frank I had difficulties at the beginning stages. The main problem was to dance but I got used to it as I had to survive.

3. Who is your Guru? Could you please give us an idea how you went about preparing for each round.

I believe that I’m blessed one because I had an opportunity to learn music under 5 gurus.

1. Smt. Shantha Venkatraman (Trichi) (carnatic vocals)

2. Smt. Prasanna Varrior (carnatic vacals)

3. Mr. Biju (Trivandrum) (Carnatic vocals)

4. Smt. Radha Varrior, deciple of late Guru Shemmangudi Bhagavathar. (carnatic vocals)

5. Smt. Panth (Hindustani vocals)

During the show I didn’t get any training from professionals. It was all done by myself, but off course George sir’s vocal training helped me a lot and I used to practise it regularly.

4. How was the support given by the Amrita TV channel in terms of co-ordination and arrangements for contestants like you who were situated away from Trivandrum?

They created a friendly environment so that we were able to practise more freely. But one thing I’ve to say is that the food was Pathetic. Accommodations were just ok. but one thing is that we could practise our song freely without any disturbances and i believe thepurpose was served.

5. How do you rate the grooming sessions before each stage of this competition? Did you all get sufficient notification about each stage and also did you get sufficient guidance about how your performance should be for each one of them?

As I said George Sir’s tips were useful. It helped me to act as a professional. I consider him as my God Father.

6. How do you rate the other contestants who participated along with you? Did you all get along well?

Initially all were good but then you know as the pressure increased everyone changed. Only Suraj, Subin, Latha, Sruthi And Charu were with me.

7. Was there any stress on you with regards to the SMS votes / campaign which was a part of the requirement for getting through to the next level in each stage? How did you work on this, especially in your case, being an outsider from Kerala, being a Mumbai based Malayalee and coming all the way from there to participate in this prestigious programme.

Actually I had no problem with regards to the campaign. My fans used to campaign votes 4 me. Many banners and voting format cards were issued to the public by fans themselves. Being a Mumbai malayalee was not at all a probs because they considered me as there own.

8. What do you rate amongst the various stages for this particular competition as the toughest round? What was the reason that made you say this particular round as very challenging.

Performance round was the most toughest coz it was very difficult for me to dance while singing.

9. Looking back at this competition after the finals, do you feel, the stages set after your elimination makes you feel that you could have performed well in those?

Yeh, I always felt that I could do better after some of my performances.

10. How often you give concerts? How many hours normally you practise?

I had a concert with G.Venugopal in the month of April. I’ve commitments in the month of oct. nov. and dec. My practise sessions are really tiring, mostly I sit for minimum 3 hrs in the morning and If I get time I practise 4 another 90 mins in the evening.

11. Other than vocal, are you learning any musical instruments?

No. but I’ll learn something.

12. Tell me something about your activities other than those involved with music.

I write lyrics 4 my own composition. I’m a lead singer of a pop band “Eternity”. I had won gold medal in the state level for painting and silver medal in the nationals (2001-02). Even now I sketch out of my imagination.

13. Tell me about your academic progress. What are you doing now?

Presently studying in final year B.Com

14. Being a resident of Mumbai, did you get any support/recognition from the numerous Malayalee associations based in Mumbai?

Yes. Chembur fine arts had felicitated me by arranging a musical nite.

15. Who is your favourite singer? And who else do you like to follow closely from the music world?

Hariharan is my all time favorite. Then, Shankar Mahadevan, Rahath Fateh Ali Khan, Kailash kher, Enrique, George peter.

16. What are your future plans? What do you want to become – musically and otherwise?

I want to be a musician. Only that much I can say.

17. Do you get noticed when you travel to Kerala after participation in this show. How do you handle this popularity / recognition/encouragements.

Well it feels great when u hear someone saying that “adh super staril paadiya paiyan alle”.

18. Any funny incidents during your participation in the show which you wish to share with all of us?

No funny incidents as such.

19. Who do you rate amongst the panel of the judges as the best? And why? Did you notice any bias or partiality?

No comments.

20. Any mention or write up on Super Star Global show cannot be completed without a word or a page on Stephan Devassy. Kindly provide us your insight on this genius. How did you find your interaction with him? How this genius worked around each episode/shoot to give you the best and bring out the best.

He was the best among the whole ssg team. While preparing song tracks he explains how to deal with each and every expressions. When we come on stage 4 the shoot he just say “polikyada mone, thagarku”. That’s Stephen Devassy.

21. And the winners prize, do you enjoy driving it around in Mumbai traffic?

Well my car is in kerala at my brother’s place. I used to drive it when I was at kerala. Waiting 4 the vacation…………

22. Tell me anything additional you want to include here

Brother it was nice answering your questions. Thank you very much.

Let us get to know Jeetu more:

Name: Jithendranath Ramachandran

DOB: 27-08-1987

Age: 19

Father:P.K.Ramachandran

Mother: Baby Ramachandran

Occupation of Father: Working in Saudi Arabia

Qualification: Doing graduation in B.Com, 3rd year

Musical background:

Studying Carnatic Music since 14 yrs, Music composing, Gold medalist in Mumbai university for light vocals. ‘Best Singer’ Award received from “Jagjeet Singh” in “Josh’06 4-5 years of freestyle & Rock, Pop and New-age

Dancing Skills: Enjoy Dancing.

Address:

“Saraswathy”, Triveni CHS, Rajaji path, Dombivili(E), Thane, Maharashtra – 421201

Awards and Achievements:

Music composing, Gold medalist in Mumbai university for light vocals. ‘Best Singer’ Award received from “Jagjeet Singh” in “Josh’06

Hobbies: Music Composing, Write lyrics in Hindi

Sun Sign: Virgo

And, why not listen to some of his best performances during the recently concluded Super Star Global programme of Amrita TV:

Jeethu about Jeethu 01

Jeetu & Nidhish singing Piyare on SSG Amrita TV

ATV Super Star Global Jeetu dt 11022008
Performance of Jeetu Super Star Global dt 11022008

Jeetu at ATV SSG

Performance of Jeetu dt 13022008

Jeethu On Super Star Global

Jeetu Sung the Kalyug song…
Thuje dekh dekh sonaa…

Amrita TV Super Star Global – Jeethu – Albela

Amrita Super Star Global – Jeethu – Thane Poovita moham

Roopa & Jeethu

Roopa & Jeethu “Boom Boom”

AMRITA TV Super Star Global – Chemmanam Poothey

Jeethu singing Adnan Sami’s song

Amrita TV SuperStar Global Jeethu – Thujhe

Interviewed and compiled by
Ramesh Menon
17072008

A date for all occasions

Posted on July 16, 2008

A date for all occasions
Rosemary Behan for THE NATIONAL Last Updated: July 15. 2008

There has to be some reward for enduring the scorching summer heat, and mine, it appears, is to be sitting in an air-conditioned majlis in the heart of the Liwa oasis, eating fresh dates. In front of me sit six exquisite boxes of the pick of this year’s harvest, ­carefully laid out in order of ripeness. At one end is the ­khadrawi, smooth, bulging, firm and green, mellowing to an orangey-yellow; in the middle are several ­varieties of ratb, perfectly half-ripe dates which ­appear to have been dipped in honey, a golden amber at one end and a translucent red or brown at the other; and at the far end are the tamr, the fully-ripe, sun-dried dates which melt in the mouth and made me almost dizzy with happiness.

Rakan al Qubaisi, the head of the organising committee for the Liwa Festival, grabs a yellow dabass, a variety of date only found in Liwa. “This one is exactly how it should be,” he said, shaking me out of my reverie. “It is exactly half-ripe. It is not flawed in its exterior aspect, and it is large.” He finds another. “This one has no chance,” he says, dismissively. “Its size is small and it’s not even regular in shape. This one has lost 30 points from the start, but the first one, the first one has 40 points already.”

Over the next 17 days, some 7,000 plates of dates will be entered into this fiercely competitive contest; a judging panel of seven will mark each out of 100, with winners walking away with Dh100,000 prizes and brand new cars, from a total prize fund worth Dh5 million. Some 40 points are given for size, 30 points for appearance and 30 points for cleanliness. Taste is only considered in one category of the competition – just as well, given the sheer quantity of fruit.

Dates are big business in Liwa. Known as the “fertile crescent”, the 60 villages and 52 oases around Mezaira’a in the heart of Abu Dhabi’s Western Region produce half of the 760,000 tons grown every year in the UAE. Over the next two weeks, some 8,000 competitors will proffer more than 10 tons of the country’s finest dates and attract in excess of 40,000 spectators. “The objective of this festival is to encourage people in the UAE to grow the best dates, champion dates,” Qubaisi said. The judging will take place in an air-conditioned dining suite while three large warehouse-style tents will house a trade fair.

Only a handful of date varieties, including the coveted khalass, dabass and bumaan, are permitted to enter the competition; other types must go for categories ­labelled “miscellaneous”. “This is not about good dates. It is about perfect dates,” said Qubaisi, who is not only a date farmer but a veritable connoisseur, as passionate about the UAE’s varieties and their environment as the most committed French oenophile is about grapes.

When it comes to producing a ­winning date, Qubaisi says size is all-important. “The bigger the date, the better. It should also be perfectly smooth, neat and clean, with no cuts, no scratches. It should be shining.”

The date palm holds a blessed position in Arab society: with its ability to thrive in the searing heat, the tree provides a reliable source of nutrients and valuable shade for the cultivation of other plants. According to an Arabic proverb, the palm tree “has its feet in heaven and its head in hell”.

The Liwa Festival began as a one-day affair four years ago; this year it will involve other activities ­including a group wedding, ­Nabati poetry and traditional arts and crafts. Yet dates are still the main ­focus, and it’s hard to get Qubaisi off the topic. He can, he claims, identify a type of date just by glancing at the tree. “I can also tell you if the tree is male or female,” he adds. “The male palm is slightly larger, it is harsher and more violent on top, and it has only two weeks a year in which to pollinate the females.”

The date palm, or phoenix dactylifera, to give it its botanical name, is dioecious, meaning that trees have either male or female reproductive organs. Only female date palms produce dates, while the male palms provide the pollen. “Between 20 and 30 good males can pollinate about 200 females,” says Qubaisi. First cultivated in Mesopotamia around 4,000 years ago, date palm trees produce fruit when they are between three and five years old, and reach their peak at around 12 years, when they can produce up to 120kg of fruit per ­season. A single bunch can contain up to 1,000 dates; palms can grow up to 30 metres in height and live productive lives for up to 150 years.

Of the competition judges, four have been drawn from the Date Palm Research and Development Programme at UAE University in Al Ain, two from commercial date companies and one from the ­Department of the Environment in Abu Dhabi. There will be a prize for the biggest single branch of dates (last year it was a staggering 68kg and won its owner Dh100,000), the most beautiful bunch of dates and even for the cleanest and best-run farm. The biggest plate of dates, at about six metres long and three metres wide, is expected to make it into the Guinness World Records. Import and export companies will trade plants and expertise, young farmers will attend lectures and the UAE University will give away thousands of young date trees artificially propagated in its laboratory, to help boost the country’s production.

The UAE is the world’s fifth-largest date producer, behind Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt and Iran. And although there are currently more than 40 million date palm trees in the country, about 10 for every person, pushing date production further and developing the inland regions is a central plank of government policy. The figures for date production in the UAE have risen in line with the country’s development: in 1971, the year the UAE was established, production stood at just 8,000 tons a year; in 2005 it was over three-quarters of a million tons, with massive exports to countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan.

Most of the dates produced and sold in the UAE are ratb, soft and moist at one end and crunchy at the other. Yet I preferred the divine, fully-ripe khalass. As Qubaisi tries to interest me in some handmade baskets and satchels, made in the traditional way from rolled and flattened palm leaves and date branches, my mind drifts back inexorably to the box at the other end of the room and the soft, moist, silkily fibrous flesh with an almost-juicy sweetness. Had I not been in the company of Qubaisi’s friends and family, I would have finished the box entirely. But it’s as if Qubaisi can read my mind. “The khalass means the final one, because it’s the best of the best. There are some dates where you would take one but you wouldn’t take another, but there are ones where you’d eat a whole box and you’d still want more, though you’d need an ambulance to get you out.”

Considering the fact that dates contain 3,000 calories per kilo, six times as many as oranges and three times more than bananas, that’s not an unrealistic possibility. Yet before the discovery of oil and when food was scarce, dates and camel milk were staple foodstuffs to the UAE’s native Bedouin population. It wasn’t an unhealthy diet: nutritionally, dates are one of the world’s most complete foods, containing carbohydrates, protein, vitamins A, B and D, iron, magnesium, calcium and potassium. Dates are also around 75 per cent sugar, a higher percentage than most fruit. In some Saharan countries, the fruit still provides vital sustenance in a largely barren desert landscape, and according to UAE University’s research programme, the average annual per capita consumption of dates in date-producing countries is between 150 and 185kg a year.

Reclining in the majlis, which is also known as a palm-hut, or arish, I enjoy views over a large wooden veranda across a palm canopy to the sandy hills of Liwa. While this is a large, permanent arish, with air-conditioning, a widescreen television and modern bathroom facilities, it is still made mostly of date palm material – its wood, leaves and branches woven together to form the roof, the internal covers and the rope tying it all together. Traditional Bedouin, who had no use for permanent housing, used to build similar makeshift shelters and live in them during the hot summer months. Qubaisi laments the loss of traditional crafts, but hopes to revive interest in these skills by awarding cash prizes to women who continue the tradition. He shows me a saroud, a traditional mat made out of woven palm fibres, and a methben, a basket which used to be used to carry male flowers to pollinate the female trees. Then he shows me a wooden clothes airer complete with an oud burner to perfume the garments from underneath – yet sadly even he cannot remember its name.

According to Qubaisi, today’s highly developed competition started in an oasis majlis just like the arish we are sitting in now. Until four years ago, the date festival was an unofficial “battle between majlises”. Qubaisi’s own son Abdullah, nine, who has his own date farm, won a car at last year’s festival for one of his submissions. But isn’t there a lot of in-fighting over who does and does not win prizes? “Not any more,” Qubaisi says. “There used to be fights over who won prizes, but this was before when it was tribe against tribe. If the judging team was from one family there would be trouble. But now all the dates are submitted anonymously – they are all transferred to plates of the same design and are barcoded, and we make sure that the judging committee is recruited from outside Liwa.”

Mohammed Musa Salem al ­Qubaisi , a beautifully wizened date farmer, remembers a time when the date ­industry wasn’t streamlined at all. Now 85 or 91 (he claims not to know his exact age), Mohamad started working on his family’s date farm at the age of 10, long before the UAE was created. “Life was very hard,” he tells me. “The people then were real fighters. None of this was here. Before planting a date palm you had to dig down 30 metres to make sure there was water there.” As if his work on the farm was not enough, Mohamad also used to spend five months of the year as a pearl diver off the coast of Abu Dhabi. “I had no money. I used to trade pearls at sea with merchants from all over the Gulf, including Iran. I used to spend the summer on the seashore and the rest of the year working in the oasis. Things got easier after Sheikh Zayed redistributed the land around here in the 1970s and brought roads and electricity.”

In today’s world of piped water and hybrid trees grown in tissue culture laboratories, Mohamed’s experiences seem to chart several lifetimes. Yet although Emirati society has moved on since his working days, and many of the cottage industries related to date production have all but died out, date farming is still a bastion of traditional values. “For me, dates are more than just a business,” Rakan al Qubaisi says. “It’s a passion. Nowadays everybody is looking for immediate profit but you can see from the dates that the best things take time. My parents used to work the land and my kids will do the same.”

rbehan@thenational.ae

Summer Promotions – The Montgomerie Dubai

Posted on July 16, 2008