Its Jashne-Baharaa at Mirchi Music Awards

Televisionpoint.com Correspondent | Mumbai
Radio Mirchi hosted a glittering award show, the Tata Indicom Mirchi Music Awards last Saturday, to honour excellence in Hindi film music and thereby felicitate deserving artists in the Indian music industry.

Eminent personalities from Bollywood and music fraternity attended the award ceremony where trophies were awarded across popular and technical genre for the year 2008 in 17 different categories.

The jury's salute for memorable contribution to music was bestowed upon saxophonist and music arranger Manohari Singh, who worked extensively with music director R D Burman. The Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Bharat Ratna Lata Mangeshkar for her outstanding contribution to the music industry over the years.

The event was hosted by singer Shaan and actress Tulip Joshi. To make the evening memorable, there were some performances by actress Genelia D'Souza, Bipasha Basu and Shahid Kapoor. Singers Kunal Ganjawala, Neeraj Shridhar, Tulsi Kumar and Shreya Ghoshal enthralled the audience with their mellifluous voices by rendering some of the best songs of the year.

The show stopper of the evening was Abhishek Bachchan who also gave away the two most important awards of the evening – Song of the Year and Album of the Year, which were won by Jashne-Baharaa from the film Jodhaa Akbar and Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na respectively.

A jury headed by lyricist Javed Akhtar selected the winners. The other prominent names on jury include Bollywood heavyweights such as Prasoon Joshi, Anu Malik, Kailash Kher, Kavita Krishnamurthy, Kunal Kohli, Lalit Pandit, Louis Banks, Ramesh Sippy, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Shankar Mahadevan, Sadhana Sargam, Suresh Wadkar and Sonu Nigam.

Prashant Panday, CEO, Entertainment Network India (ENIL), says, "Music is the lifeblood of radio and for Radio Mirchi to host this first edition of the Tata Indicom Mirchi Music Awards is but natural."

As a build up to the awards, Radio Mirchi 98.3 FM and Tata Indicom ran an talent hunt contest for aspiring singers across 23 key locations in India. Aimed at identifying a combination of ideal voice, spunk and X factor, the contest winner, Prachi Shah from Ahmedabad, got a chance to attend as well as perform at the Awards.

The Awards will be telecast on April 12, at 9.30 pm on Star Plus. The entire award function, including nominations and selection of works, was validated by Ernst & Young.