Sanjaya: Giving Them Something to Talk About

— -- "I can promise you we won't soon forget you," quipped "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest Wednesday night after Sanjaya Malaker was finally voted off the show.

Until that moment it seemed the worse he sang, Sanjaya only became more invincible. Howard Stern gloated. Simon Cowell threatened to walk out of his contract. One disbelieving fan went on a hunger strike whose progress she posted on MySpace. Others kept Sanjaya alive through the Vote for the Worst campaign.

Through it all, though, Sanjaya just kept smiling, warbling and changing his hairstyle. Even as the very last seconds of his 15 minutes of fame were ticking away, he turned defeat into one final little comic triumph by crooning that he'd give people "something to talk about. … Other than hair."

It was a graceful exit.

What was it about Sanjaya that provoked such intense reactions? "American Idol" is, after all, a show built as much on the spectacle of humiliation of bad pop star wannabes wearing their hearts on their sleeves and their hopes pinned to their newly bleached teeth as it is to the mission of discovering new talent for the recording industry.

Ethnically, Sanjaya was a novelty: an Indian American. Born to a Bengali classical musician and an Italian-American mother in the same town that produced grunge rock and Kurt Cobain, Sanjaya was the first South Asian performer to strut his stuff, night after night, in front of millions of American television viewers.

This seemed to unbalance some American viewers. The Associated Press ran a story that blamed Indian employees in call centers on the other side of the world for Sanjaya's longevity. According to this rather paranoid theory, thousands of Indian call center employees were exploiting their access to banks of phone lines and the time difference to shower "American Idol" with votes for Sanjaya.

This absurd story was finally deconstructed: Call center employees are too busy taking calls from irate Americans having problems with their credit cards and electronic devices to put in mass calls to the United States on behalf of one of their ethnic compatriots.

The writer is an associate fellow of the Asia Society and the author of "Planet India: How the Fastest-Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World" (Scribner 2007).