Souparnika Nair, all of ten years old, is the latest sensation on the musical firmament. AR Rahman tweeted a clip of her performance for the audition of the ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ (BGT) show on ITV, the UK, adding ‘Nice to wake up to this’.
Souparnika won the hearts of the judges of the show with her rendition of ‘Never Enough’, sung by Loren Allred in the musical The Greatest Show on Earth .
“It is a dream come true. I have been working and practising for this since last year,” says Sou, as she likes to be called, over a Zoom call from Suffolk in the UK.
Bowled over by her confident performance, many celebrities including actor Mohanlal, singer KS Chithra and author-politician Shashi Tharoor reached out to congratulate her. Tharoor also shared the link of her performance on Twitter and urged people to vote for her. With 67.2 K subscribers on her YouTube channel, Sou has been making waves with her music.
Although she began her audition for the Britian’s Got Talent show by singing Judy Garland’s ‘Trolley Song’ in Meet Me in St.Louis, Simon Cowell, one of the four judges, stopped her performance midway and requested her to sing ‘Never Enough’.
Souparnika Nair
Was she nervous at this sudden change of plan? “A bit, but then it went well. So it was all right. The audience was supportive and in the end, I got a standing ovation,” she says with a grin. “‘Never Enough’ was one of the songs in the list I had given to the judges and but still it was not easy,” she adds.
Sou clinched her place in the semi-final of the show with that rendering of hers. Her performance at the semi-final was aired on September 12 and the judges gave her a standing ovation after she finished singing ‘Neverland’, sung by Zendaya in the musical Finding Neverland . An admirer of yesteryear singers Doris Day, Judy Garland and Julie Andrews, she also follows Christina Aguilera. Sou has been learning music from the age of eight.
“We noticed that Sou could get the pitch and rhyme of the songs she used to listen to. Her primary school teacher noticed her innate talent in music and Sou won a couple of prizes too. That is when we decided to get her trained in music,” says Renjitha Chandran, Sou’s mother, a trained Bharatanatyam dancer. Her father, Dr Binu Nair, who is in medical oncology, is a Carnatic vocalist.
Souparnika Nair
Sou feels that her aptitude for music comes from her father, who still performs once in a while in festivals. Sou’s parents, both of whom hail from Kollam in Kerala, moved to the UK six years ago. She elaborates that the songs are chosen in consultation with her parents and the team at BGT.
“My parents are proud of me. My classmates told me that they had watched the show and that I had done well,” she says. In fluent Malayalam, she adds that her grandparents in Kerala are also extremely proud of her.
Admitting that she is excited and happy “because I had lovely comments from all around the world”, she adds that she is looking forward to singing on the Western stage as a professional.
In step with ballet
The versatile Sou is also learning ballet and, but for the pandemic, she would have been taking her Grade IV exam for ballet.
For the last two years, Souparnika has been giving public performances. She performed at the London Palladium as the ‘Unexpected Star’ in a show hosted by Michael Mcintyre on BBC in 2019, which happened to be her first TV programme.
And does playback singing in Indian cinema enthuse her? “Oh yes! I would like to do that,” she says without any hesitation.
