Talent Time

Last Saturday I was given the honour to be one of the judges at a talent contest. This contest was organised by the Music and Theatre Club of High School Muar and it was open to all the high school students in Muar. The theme of the contest was 'BACK TO BASICS' and all the contestants got to show off any kind of talent like singing, dancing, performing on music instruments and so forth.

I must say, youngsters nowadays are entirely different compared to our time (Ahem, I'm referring to the early 80s here....). I was really impressed with how talented they were. The teenagers sang latest hits from popular singers, formed their own band, did hip hop, breakdancing, jump dance, just to name some. Some came charming the audience with the guitar, even the 'er-hu' and 'gu-zheng' (both Chinese traditional musical instruments).

I had been invited to judge in a number of singing contests in the last century. Since this time was not just a singing contest, the variety of talented performance certainly did not make judging easy for me, based on a 4-part judging criterion of originality, presentation or showmanship, costume and X factor.

As usual, every judge was presented with a souvenir at the end of the show before the announcement of the results. Yet this time, even the 'souvenir' too, was different from before. It was in the form of cash. I thought that was practical. So if I ever had the honour to perform a judging task again in future, I sincerely hoped that I would be presented with a bigger 'souvenir'.