An aspiring young opera star from the Himalayas moved the audience to tears with his rendition of a Hindi song.
A 53-year-old deaf man performed a comedic mime of a train journey to work, and a blindfolded archer shot at a target located precariously close to the Bollywood celebrity judges.
Millions of Indians have been keenly following these acts and others that appeared in Sunday's semi-finals of the hit television show India's Got Talent.
Network executives, meanwhile, are rubbing their hands with glee at the success of such programmes, which command premium advertising rates.
For advertisers, including the car giant Maruti-Suzuki, which is the presenting sponsor of India's Got Talent, these shows are an unrivalled way to reach into the homes of an audience with burgeoning spending power.
"The maximum viewership comes in from the format of non-fiction [reality and talent] shows," says Smita Jha, the head of the entertainment and media practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers in India.
"That makes the channel popular and then they are able to get the premium from an advertiser in terms of the advertising rates on that channel.
"Even though when you look at the business model, the amount of money that gets spent on producing those shows far exceeds the revenues if you were to just look at the advertising spot on those particular programmes," she adds. "But on an overall basis, the premium is so large that when it is applied to other shows, the rates of that particular channel go up."
Last year, television advertising revenues in India reached 116 billion rupees (Dh7.89bn), up 12.6 per cent on the previous year. Advertising spending is expected to grow to 230bn rupees by 2016, according to a report by KPMG and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry released this year.
"The TV industry continues to have headroom for further growth as television penetration is still [only] at approximately 60 per cent of total households," according to the report .
India has the third-most television viewers in the world, after the United States and China, with 146 million households owning a TV, according to the report.
Alongside the ever-popular soap operas, hit shows in the country include Bigg Boss, the country's version of Big Brother, Dance India Dance, a programme that brings in unknowns to compete as dancers, and Kaun Banega Corepati, which literally translates to "who wants to be a ten-millionaire?".
"TV advertising is actually a very large industry in India, both from a volume perspective and also from a rates perspective," says Ms Jha. "The fact that we have 140 million-odd TV homes, each channel itself has an instant reach.
"The TV medium has been used by the advertisers to advertise wherever they need to brand building. If you put one ad on a particular channel, or you put it on a set of the top 10 channels, you've got your entire market covered in a 30-second spot."
Anil Wanvari, the founder and chief executive of Indiantelevision.com, which provides industry analysis, is bullish about the industry's future.
"The television market is buoyant," he says. "There's a lot of reality television and talent hunts, and the staple of any television network is soaps and series. These shows bring in the rise in ratings."
Zee Entertainment, one of India's biggest networks, reported a few days ago that advertising revenues for the three months from July to September this year surged by 33.7 per cent compared to the same quarter last year to reach 5.28bn rupees.
"General business sentiments are expected to turn positive following a slew of reforms announced by the government," says Subhash Chandra, the chairman of Zee.
Yet analysts have nevertheless trimmed growth forecasts for television advertising spending for this year because of the slowing expansion of India's economy and the global environment. This has prompted some companies to cut advertising budgets.
"While this year, the industry advertising spend seems to be hit due to macroeconomic factors, we are confident of continued double-digit growth of television advertising spending over the next few years," says Punit Goenka, the managing director and chief executive of Zee.
The major shift in the industry is the transition from analogue to digital. At the end of this month, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata are scheduled to switch off analogue signals, which means that households in those metropolitan areas will have to subscribe to digital services to watch television.
This is also expected to boost advertising opportunities.
There still remains huge potential for the sector, everyone agrees. But the challenge facing producers is to create the next major breakaway programme that will keep viewers on the edge of their seats.
A lot of the shows have already run for several seasons and the consensus among executives is that there is "stagnancy" in the programmes being broadcast. Producers are trying to dream up the next big hit as the main networks compete for viewers and edge ahead of their peers.
"The industry is looking for a new formula," says Mr Wanvari. "Everyone's looking for the next breakthrough."