Playing with tunes

Meet young singer Aditi Iyer, who’s making a mark in pop and opera music

Aditi Iyer

While kids her age are outside cycling or inside watching videos on the Internet, 10-year-old Aditi Iyer is working on her dream of becoming a world famous singer. “Singing isn’t just a hobby. It’s my life,” she says over telephone from New Delhi.

Aditi started showing signs of her musical inclination when she was very young, says her mother Sangeetha Iyer. “She was around 16 months old, when she started humming and singing along to The Beatles,” she says. The family was in London when Aditi was born, then moved to Singapore, then Jakarta before moving back to India five years ago. Aditi has a YouTube channel managed by Culture Machine, a digital media company; they have included her in a World Music Day special song where she has sung with 20 artistes including Mihir Joshi, Blaaze, Kiran Oberoi and Ankita Sachdev and this brought about a collaboration with Aditya Narayan for a cover of Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed.

The first song that Aditi recorded was 

Power of Love  by Celine Dion, one of her favourite singers. “I also love Michael Jackson, Adele, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. I prefer singing pop and opera since I don’t have a good low- pitch voice.” This reflects in her song choices — Gloria Gaynor’s

I Will Survive , Whitney Houston’s

I Will Always Love You and Miley Cyrus’

Wrecking Ball to name a few. Largely self-taught, Aditi has been training under Situ Singh Buehler, founder of the Delhi Opera Ensemble, for the past eight months.

The buzz created on the Internet caught the eye of the promoters of Romanian reality show

Next Star Romania — their version of Indian Idol . In late September, the show aired a half-hour segment on Aditi, where she sang Mariah Carey’s Hero. The confident little girl already has one original song in her repertoire — Every Flower Is Precious – and a second song is in the works. “It’s called No Match For Me and it’s about bullying. I experienced it when I joined my earlier school. But later I became strong and told them in my own way that I would not stand for it. I want to help others who are going through the same thing,” she says with conviction in her voice. The student of Class V loves watching horror movies apart from all her school activities of karate, swimming, gymnastics, tennis, dancing and art. “Music is what is most important to me. I won’t stop till I achieve my goal!”