Zee TV has been a pioneer and a trend-setter in shaping television content over the past three decades and once again, it seems to be changing the face of music reality shows with its latest non-fiction property, the Indian Pro Music League (IPML). In a clutter-breaking format innovation, Zee TV launched the world’s first-ever music league championship on February 26th, 2021. While the world of sports has seen several league competitions, this unique music league has six teams representing different regions of India, battling it out against each other in a musical championship. Each of these six teams supported by leading Bollywood and sports celebrities has top playback singers as their captains, one reality show star, and one fresh voice. Celebrated singers – Mika Singh, Kailash Kher, Sajid Khan, Shaan, Ankit Tiwari, Javed Ali, Asees Kaur, Bhoomi Trivedi, Akriti Kakar, Payal Dev, Neha Bhasin, Shilpa Rao are captains of these six zonal teams.
The much-anticipated and upcoming episode of Indian Pro Music League will exhibit some of the strongest performances of the show till date. One such performance was by Divya Kumar, who joined the Punjab Lions team in the show. Babbar Sher, as Mika likes to call him, not only swamped the audience with his dynamic performance on the song ‘Jee Karda’ from ‘Badlapur’ but even narrated a rather interesting story on how he bagged the song right after his performance.
Divya Kumar got quite emotional while talking about the song and said “During that time I was assisting Sachin Jigar when our producer Dinesh Vijan sir who was producing Badlapur that time, came up to us and said that he wanted us to make a song for the film. So the half an hour that he took to reach the studio, Sachin Jigar utilized that time to frame a few ideas revolving around the song and then everybody was doing every bit to build it into a number. Throughout the process I used to be there, since you know I was assisting Sachin and we would spend hours working on the lines and the tune. So, I used to record scratches and Sachin knew it, so he might have casually asked me to sing a couple of lines from the song and I agreed. But the very moment I was about to start, I heard Dino sir saying that they’ll get a fresh voice for the song and that completely triggered me. The exasperation you all feel while listening to the song is not because I was heartbroken or something but because I was irritated with the fact that they weren’t even considering me as an option. But the song got approved and somehow it clicked and all of them just wanted me to be the voice of that song.”
He further added “You know the original song has the same mukhra I sang that day at around 2 in the night. Even Varun, came at midnight to hear the song and when he heard the song, he really appreciated me and couldn’t even believe it in the first place that it was my voice. And the best part was, he took me wherever he went for the promotions and made me sing that song. And, I really think that’s how the song became so big, because it got instilled in everybody’s mind.”
While Divya Kumar’s powerpack performance will take you through a thunder ride, wait till you see the rest of the teams buckling up for a major battle.
