Tihar Idol, a talent hunt in jail premises for inmates

New Delhi, April 8 (IANS) Confined within the high walls of Tihar Jail, inmates of the largest prison complex in South Asia, will soon have a chance to sing or compose music in a album, 'Tihar Idol', a talent hunt organised within the jail premises for the inmates.

"Tihar Idol is a talent hunt where inmates will be selected for various genre like singing, lyrics and music from all the nine jails of Tihar prison. After selecting them, they will be trained and groomed to sing in a album. The audition for the talent hunt will kick start within a week," Deputy Inspector General (Prisons) R.N. Sharma told IANS.

Starting the auditions within a week, the RVP Directors, a production house joining hands with Music One, a music company are setting up a studio in the premises of jail number 3.

"We are setting up a studio to facilitate the recording for the album which will be done by the inmates. We will have three months of training, grooming sessions for the selected singers, musicians, composers and lyricists to create albums that will comprise about 32 songs. The albums are likely to have a Punjabi track, Hindi, devotional songs and old classical Hindi songs," Rahul Suneja, music director and one of the organisers told IANS.

He also added that about 2,000 applications for the auditions will be distributed in the coming week.

The studio will come up on RVP Directors' expenses and a portion of the profits from the sales of the music album will be utilised for the prisoners' welfare fund.

"The production house RVP Directors came forward with this idea of creating an album by the Tihar inmates, after they came to know about the music album - Sarangi Redefined by sarangi maestro Kamal Sabri. The album featured vocals and music by Tihar's inmates," Sharma said.

He also said that already each jail has a music room and there are about 100 good singers among the undertrials and convicts, who will be given first preference in the auditions.

"There are about 100 jail inmates who are very talented musicians and singers. Tihar Idol will definitely give them an opportunity to do something productive and it will come up in the reformation programme," Sharma added.

Tihar Jail, one of the largest in India, houses almost 11,000 prisoners. It has a rock band, "Flying souls" and has many programmes and extra curricular activities like yoga, sports, computer education to engage prisoners.