The selections in Delhi were done in a two-day marathon round of auditions that had 1100 participants of which thirty were short-listed for a final yesterday morning. Three judges – crooner and composer Shibani Kashyap, last year’s captain Sakshi Singh, and representative of the channel Devyani Desai – asked the participants to show their imagination, creativity and spontaneity in the 'Kahani Mai Twist' and 'Jaan Pehachan' rounds. Ten-year old Jasjot Singh Kwatra, a fifth class student from Guru Nanak School in west Delhi, was ultimately named by Shibani as the winner from Delhi.

Jasjot will now join the other nine Captains and go to Mumbai for the meeting on programming, to interact with others from the channel. Such meetings are held once every three months, and the Captains have been chosen for one year. Former captains are part of what the channel calls the Captains’ Club.

While the channel does not pay any money to the Captains, it pays up to Rs 100,000 per child the training or tuition for the child in the field of his or her interest over the next year or so.

After the announcement, young Jasjot told indiantelevision.com that he wanted to be an astronaut when he grows up, and said Sunita Williams was his role model. He said he had definite views about some of the programmes he likes and those he did not like on the channel and would say so in Mumbai.

Meanwhile, K Seshasaye who heads Corporate Communications in Hungama TV told indiantelevision.com that the aim was to ensure that children got to see what they wanted, and therefore their opinions mattered and changes had been made in previous years following the suggestions made by the young ones. The Captains do their homework before coming to the meetings, which includes getting the views of their friends in different pasts of the country or the city to which they belong.

He said in reply to a question that the channel also had its own child psychologists and strictly followed a code of Standards and Practices to prevent any programming or advertisements not suitable for the young. Since the programmes were dubbed into Hindi in what he termed as ‘transcreation’ and not dubbing, care was taken to ensure that the language remained simple and not offensive.

He said while the selection of the first year 2004-05 was on the theme of ‘Do you have the guts’, the themes in subsequent years was ‘Talent’ and ‘Intellect’. Keeping in view the aim of the channel, the theme this year was ‘Mad Fun’ which was also a loose meaning of the word Hungama.

The Hindi channel is run by United Home Entertainment Limited, a fully owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company (Southeast Asia) Pte. Ltd., and was acquired from UTV. Seshasaye claimed that it reached 39 million homes. He said there were six other channels beaming in India for children - Cartoon Network, Pogo, Disney, Jetix, Animax, and Niclodean – but only Hungama TV was beaming local programming to the extent of forty per cent. The rest was mostly Japanese animation series. All the programmes were dubbed in Hindi. The channel had both animation and live action programmes.

While children spent 40 per cent of their time seeing children’s channels globally, the average for Hungama TV in India was 25 per cent, rising from just nine per cent in 2004.

The programming was divided into three: for pre-schoolers in the mornings, the Six to Nine age group in the early afternoons, and then the Nine to fourteen later in the evening. Since it was adults who decided what they wanted to see in the evening hours in a scenario of one-television homes, the prime time on Hungama TV ended by 19:00 hrs.