“I do not want anybody to vote for me (out of sympathy).”

“I miss my baby girl; she’s the only one who makes me smile when everything’s going wrong…”

Idol contestant Benjamin Chow wrote this song for his girlfriend during Boot Camp with guitar which he only picked up for a week. He made it into Boot Camp, is in Top 24, but still feeling that things have gone wrong for him. After the drama on his hacked Facebook account and the controversy of his crutch – real or not – that arose from that incident; you would have guessed the cause of his frustration.

“I’ve already had questions like: Eh, Ben, this (crutches) is quite fake right?” he revealed on Day 2 of Top 24’s Boot Camp.

One contestant also asked reporters, “His injury, is it real?”

And it seems that the judges have their reservations about this contestant’s physical disability too. On several rounds of auditions, they criticized him for overemphasizing his condition – to some extent, hinting that it is his gimmick to win votes.

Benjamin revealed, “He (Ken) said that I was using the crutch like as if I was using it… when I think about it later, I realized he was talking about it as a media gimmick, as if I was using it to get votes, get sympathy from people. And I don’t want that. Let me make this clear. I do not want anybody to vote for me (out of sympathy).”

The 20-year-old used to be a dancer before he twisted his foot a year back, and the injury deteriorated into a muscle condition. Undefeated, he continued dancing and sprained his other ankle, so it’s two legs down now.

“The fact is that I can’t walk and it’s affecting me, and it did affect me on an emotional level, because I used to be a dancer, I used to enjoy dancing. And when that (accident) happened, which is about a year ago, I was crushed because I can’t perform most of the moves I used to be able to do. And now I’m a lot slower than a lot of other people here.”

Besides his current physical disability, his attitude is also a pisser to many other contestants. One revealed, “He’s weird, always singing, and rather bossy too.”

Ben does not deny that; in fact he is aware of the bad vibes he gives others which he attributes to his constant singing. He also lamented how his attempts to get advice get misconstrued as arrogance.

In spite of all odds, he is determined to recover with the physiotherapies he is going through. “I’m not going to stay this way forever.” Reminded by his bunkmate Ryan Lee about the motivational speech by Adam Khoo they just sat through, Benjamin corrected his sentence, “I will get better!”