Airtel Super Singer 5

Ground auditions were held in the cities of Chennai, Coimbatore, and Trichy.[1] Ground level auditions were telecast from 2 June 2015. Preliminary round auditions were telecast from 3 June 2015.

The auditions were held in various parts of Tamil Nadu, and were telecast until 4 July 2015. First round audition judges included season 3 winner Saisharan, season 4 winner Diwakar, and former contestants from those seasons such as D. Sathyaprakash, Pooja Vaidyanath, Santhosh Hariharan, and Sonia. Second and third round audition judges included S. P. Charan, Pushpavanam Kuppuswamy, Devan Ekambaram, James Vasanthan, Mahathi, Sowmya, and Shalini. Zonal audition judges were permanent judges from the junior version of the show, Malgudi Shubha, Mano, and K. S. Chithra. A total of 33 contestants were selected for the finals, including local, international, and former contestants.

• Anand Aravindakshin (contestant ID SS05 Entered Finals)

• Fareedha M (contestant ID SS02 Entered Finals)

• Rajaganapathy G (contestant ID SS03 Entered Finals)

• Siyad K (contestant ID SS04 Entered Finals)
• Lakshmi Pradeep (contestant ID SS07 Entered Finals)

• Priya jerson (contestant ID SS06)

• Sowmya (contestant ID SS12)

• Arjun adapalli (contestant ID SS01)

• Nirujan S (contestant ID SS10)

• Latha Krishna R (contestant ID SS08)
• Arvind Mukundan (contestant ID SS09)

• Irwin Victoria Thomas (contestant ID SS11)

The Hindu newspaper and other media outlets reported that the Tamil language show, its winning contestant, and its telecasting channel Star Vijay landed in controversy after the finale;[4] "trending on social media for all the wrong reasons".[4] Fans were enraged as details emerged that winning contestant Anand Aravindakshan already featured as a playback singer for at least ten songs in Indian films, including songs in Tamil films.[5] Actor and filmmaker, Lakshmy Ramakrishnan wrote on Facebook that "this cannot have happened without the channel’s knowledge" and that "unethical practices have resulted in victimising not just Anand, but other participants and, of course, the audience, who spend time and money by sending SMSes to support talented youngsters."[4][6] As the show has a reputation of finding budding singing talent and giving them the exposure and platform to enter the Indian film industry,[4][7] social media users criticised the channel of not being upfront about the fact that a professional singer had participated as a contestant in the show and accused the channel of wrongdoing.[4]

According to media reports, the controversy arose after a Facebook post accused TV channel Star Vijay of flouting its competition rules, and hiding the contestant's true identity from the public.[5] Star Vijay responded to the accusations in printed media to assert that it did not hide the contestant's identity and that the current rules permitted existing playback singers to participate in the competition.[7][8] Officials from the channel declared they see no need to disclose information to the public. The show's permanent judge and playback singer Srinivas also suggested it was unnecessary to rake up the past as the contestant won the most votes.[9]

Accusations of wrongdoing were also made against the winning contestant, who refuted the allegations and expressed his dismay in a Facebook post.[10] Viewers and social media users acknowledged that although the information was accessible on the contestant's Facebook and some other sites as refuted by the contestant,[11] the channel probably should have explicitly stated the information to be fair,[11] having failed to do so in at least 200 of its episodes. Social media users also noted that Star Vijay hid most of the show's episodes from audience scrutiny during the season; although almost all episodes from the season were made available for viewing-on-demand at the time of the finale, various episodes from its past seasons and spin-off seasons have been hidden from the public.

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