Now that Zain has been eliminated

Zain was never going to win this show. I’d have been extremely disappointed if he did. But I won’t lie — with him gone, this show is a lot less entertaining now. As a casual viewer who’s watched the entire show so far, Zain was among the few performers I actually looked forward to listening to, primarily because of his song choices and his actual personality and stage presence.

That is not to say the other contestants aren’t good — in fact, they’re tons better than Zain, which is why I never expected him to win. But in my personal opinion, what we’re left with now is… a bit boring when it comes to song choices and variety.

Zain:
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen numerous comments and posts insulting and degrading him for his previous performances, as well as videos and posts dating back to before this show. I’ve also seen a lot of undue comparison, which is what I’m going to refrain from doing, since I see no reason to bring others down.

Everyone claims that Zain never went outside of his genre, but if you look at the songs he sang, they were all somewhat different:

1. Lai Beqadraa Naal Yaari — fairly decent performance
2. Deewanai Chalain Sath — a breath of fresh air after listening to only ghazals in the previous rounds
3. Keh Dena — atrocious and elimination-worthy. Had he been eliminated here, I would have completely understood
4. Mast Qalandar — fairly decent again
5. Mehndi Ki Raat — probably one of his best. A key criticism here was that he sounded like Jawaad, which I can’t understand — since when is it a problem to sound like the singer who sang the original song?
6. Purani Jeans — another good performance and sufficiently different from the original
7. Dhonla — a bit of a copy-paste, but again, many competitors sing the same genre and nearly the same kind of song and get away with it
8. Kal Shab Dekha — probably one of his best again

Another thing I was very disappointed by was people taking videos from his past — or from each episode or other exclusive clips — and using those to further insult him. We don’t know how people evolve over time — how their personalities and even singing abilities change. And what bearing does someone’s past have on their current singing and position in this show?

Mehtab:
I saw a lot of comments asking for Mehtab’s elimination, potentially because of his accent and how it interacted with his singing. Mehtab, at least based on official feedback, also never really had a bad performance, barring maybe one exception. He tackled multiple songs and also developed a stage presence that was far better than many others on the show.

He was clearly a simple person with limited exposure and likely came from a small town. Instead of building him up, I saw lots of people in this sub trying to bring him down, which was very disappointing.