Mathilda D’Silva is the sixth contestant to be out despite hitting a new high with her sizzling performance on Wednesday. Was she too garang and scary for home viewers? Or did her full figure fail to win them over? If anything, she’s got balls. “If people say that Singapore doesn’t want a fat person up there singing, then they wouldn’t have brought me this far.”


Towards the end of our interview this morning, newly eliminated Idol contestant Mathilda D' Silva starts looking around for a drink. Someone fetches her a glass of cold water, which she downs gratefully and goes, “Oh, that's so good.”

Ah, the simple pleasure of cold, scintillating, cold, cooling, cold water. It wasn't so long ago that Mathilda had to refrain from having any, taking instead loads of pi pa gao , honey and syrupy lozenges to keep her throat optimally well warmed up for singing.

Among all the Idol contestants, Mathilda is perhaps the worst example of your typical Idol dream chaser. She doesn't have an impossibly skinny-yet-voluptuous figure or possess features so quaint or pretty to drive raging teen hormones even wilder. She's not devoid of appeal, but rather, her personality overwhelms.

Hell, she's even been asked by judge Ken Lim to tone down her ‘garang' ness once. Mathilda describes herself as a people person who can't execute these “ yan dao (handsome) looks and cutie faces” but totally digs the people who came down to see the show at the MediaCorp Theatre.

“When I'm on stage, my mind goes on autopilot. I don't think, it just happens. I can't even control what I do! Which explains why I get the crazy eyes, the excessive moving, and all the dramatics that Ken calls it. It just happens. It's pure passion and it's out there, it's impossible to control.”

An unwavering sense that Mathilda is her own woman emanates from her, even as she tells us that she never really thinks of herself as being really unique. More like an unconscious rebel, we think.

So it doesn't even much bother her that people have commented that her full figure does nothing for her as an Idol contestant.

“Everyone's spoken to me about image and all, but I think Singapore has proved them wrong. If people say that Singapore doesn't want a fat person up there singing, then they wouldn't have brought me this far. Okay, so I'm a bit bigger, but why can't we all be a bit more comfortable with who we are? We're like, ‘I don't look like the chick in the magazine, I don't look like Giselle Bundchen, why can't I fit into my size six pants anymore?' … If we all went ‘whatever', that leaves us a lot more room to concentrate on important things.”

She's got a mind of her own, and she speaks it.

“In everything that I do, if you look at the stuff I write, short films I made, everything I do, I never do anything safe. If it's gonna be garang , it will be. If it's not of the mould, it just is. I'm very comfortable in my own skin, I know I'm not a typical teeny bopper, I always wanted to bring that extra oomph on TV. I wanted to see someone on TV blow the stage apart — that was what I wanted to be.”

Blow the stage she did, and her rock-the-house-down and energetic performance of Bon Jovi's Living on a Prayer on Wednesday drew impressed praise from three out of four judges.

The rebel vibe we sense from her — correction, the ‘if I want to do it, to hell with it I will' vibe — also reflects in her (as Mathilda puts it) ‘eclectic' fan following which ranges wildly from school misfits to aunties and uncles that includes the cleaning staff working in MediaCorp.

True to her words, an auntie walks up to us and grabs hold of Mathilda to express her utmost disdain that Mathilda is no longer in the competition — an example of fans who have been moved by Mathilda, and in turn move her with how they have been moved… you get the drift.

“People would come up to me and say, ‘Oh when you sang Whitney, I cried, when you sang Bootylicious , I was at the sewing machine, got up and started dancing.' It really touches me.”

It was no surprise then, that yesterday night, the unveiling of the results that Mathilda was to go home drew thunderous chants of ‘Mathilda! Mathilda!' from outraged fans who all knew that it wasn't a rocky performance that did her in.

Her exit was ill-timed, as Mathilda was seriously contemplating for the first time ever, that she could actually be the next Singapore Idol.

“For the past weeks I have been thinking I could have been the Singapore Idol. Before that, I never really envisioned myself up there in Kallang Indoor Stadium in the top two and singing with a lot of confetti pouring on your head. But then a lot of people told me, ‘If you step up your game, you could actually be the Singapore Idol'. And I was like, I can't wait to see that.”

Back to the results show. As judge Florence Tan expressed her shock about how either Mathilda, Jonathan Leong, Hady Mirza and Paul Twohill would be ousted, further commenting that at least three of them didn't deserve their unenviable predicament, Gurmit declared the inevitable bad news

What does it say about the competition, now that talented folks — her, Rahimah Rahim and Jay Lim — are getting voted off consecutively?

“The people who say we are the best singers are feeling, but not voting,” Mathilda asserts. “There are a lot of couch critics who go, ‘Hey, why like that?!' But it's like, ‘Dude, unless you put the sixty cents down and vote… This is not the first time we have been in that position. Everybody needs to wake up and think if this is what they want.”

Wake up call? We can't help but think of the promotional telly trailer that has been running circles around our heads for the past week with, “This IS a singing competition” —a self-ironic poke that wonders aloud if the competition was really a popularity contest instead. (The trailer is also widely seen as an obvious reference to a particular contestant remaining in the Top 6. Bless his heart.)

Still, with regards to the crazy voters out there who view the Singapore Idol competition as a search for an idol, not a singer, Mathilda begs to differ. “(As the Singapore Idol) you are the one who walks up to the world and people look at you and go, ‘This is what Singapore is capable of.' It's a lot to take on. You have to be internationally amazing.”

Now that the Top 12 competition has been halved to six contestants, she feels only one thing matters for the remaining contestants: focus on the performance.

“Nothing compares to that one minute and 45 seconds, because nobody can control you. You are the pilot of that show. The soundman can't stop halfway, the judges, the producers can't do anything. No one can touch you. You fly solo, and when you do that, that's the time you shine. We work very hard week after week to own that.”

Anyone could get to the top two spots for the grand finals, she says, although Mathilda hopes to see Hady Mirza versus Jonathan Leong, whom she feels like born performers.

“Like I told that dude (Hady), he hasn't shown all his cards, but I know that once he does, there's no denying the boy's a superstar. When I look at Jon, there's this rock star thing about him. As much as he tries to deny it, he's got it. It'd be an amazing show to watch.”

A grand grand final? Our fingers are crossed.