A finalist on TV’s highest rated-programme, the 17-year-old Indian-American Seattle resident—who sports chameleon-like hair, a wispy voice and funky fashion stylings, has become this month’s pop-culture punching bag, the celebrity everyone loves to hate.

On Wednesday, he moved up one more round in the American Idol contest showing off his fan base that seems to be determined to keep the lanky lad on stage. Sanjaya will be back next week hoping to stay on till the current season ends in May.

Critics worry that his continued presence on the show will erode some of the goodwill the show has built up, thanks to the success of albums such as Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson and Grammy winners Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood. “By putting these less-talented people like Sanjaya in the top 24, the producers have already undermined the purpose of the whole show,” said Jerry Friday, former board president for the Miss Atlanta Scholarship Pageant and a friend of Season One contestant Tamyra Gray.

Saturday Night Live last weekend mocked Sanjaya’s cover of the Kinks’ You Really Got Me.

The web site www.votefortheworst.com, which encourages voters to get behind the worst singers, has embraced him. So has Howard Stern, the Sirius satellite radio jock, apparently for irony’s sake. There’s even a woman on MySpace claiming to starve herself until he gets voted off.

Adding fuel to the firestorm, Sanjaya on Tuesday gleefully wore a faux mohawk, fashioned from seven ponytails, a visual that overshadowed his vocal shortcomings while covering No Doubt’s Bathwater.

Recently, Sanjaya has managed to stay in tune but hasn’t shown the vocal chops necessary to win the competition. “If you had the gumption

to just totally go for it” vocally, judge Paula Abdul said during Tuesday’s show, “then it

would fit the wackiness of the mohawk.”

Earlier in the competition, when the judges criticised him, Sanjaya seemed hurt. With his huge grin and bushy, expressive eyebrows, he now appears emboldened, almost carefree on stage. “I think he’s bought into the freak show,” said Constantine Maroulis, a Season Four finalist, during a post-show commentary on Wednesday on tv.yahoo.com.

Idol Executive Producer Nigel Lythgoe even turned Sanjaya into a strange verb earlier this week during a press conference. “I was myself ‘Sanjayaed’ purely and simply because he’s got guts, this kid, and you have to applaud that,” Lythgoe said. Idol remains America’s No. 1 show in its sixth season by a large margin, but ratings and number of votes tallied each week are down slightly from a year ago.

One popular theory for Sanjaya’s staying power is that pre-teen and teenage girls love his harmless, vaguely effeminate looks and are providing enough votes to keep him around. Debra Byrd, an Idol vocal coach since the show’s first season, on Wednesday called Sanjaya a fun, witty kid with potential. “His first performance, he was not in tune,” she said. “But he’s getting progressively better. You realise he can sing. I make him work for it.”