Indian Culture with a dash of Karan Johar

Sun nite I was invited to watch an Arangetum of a colleague's family friend's daughter. It was a bharatnatyam performance and I thought it would be a good idea to spend a Sun nite. If it got boring, I can always walk out and see something on TV. Got David (my french friend) also to come along. Thought it would be a good idea to make him watch something different. He was shocked in the morning when I explained to him about cricket and the 6 hours long ODI. After seeing his reaction I decided not to mention abt the test match!

I have to confess that I had never seen an arangetum before in my life, atleast fully. Have heard of marathon arangetums happening during temple festivals and all. If ever any classical dance comes on TV, I just change channels...So that was my past experience with classical dance of any sort. So there I was in the PJ civic centre, one among the thousands of Tamil family and friends of the gal, some surd/chinese and malay friends of the family. There was a small nicey printed booklet explaining the occasion. A page for the chief guest (he was the husband of teh guru), one for the guru (she was heading a dance academy which had many branches in Malaysia and Singapore), one for the gal's family (major hifi family, mountaineers and stuff) and their achievements, one about the gal (she it seems was a topper and also did gymnastics and mountaineering herself and wanted to Finance and Accounting in Australia)...There were some pages dedicated to pictures of the gal while she was growing up and how dance influenced her life etc etc. And finally there were those half page ads (I remember how tough it was to sell such space in a symposium magazine or college magazine, back there in RECT) by uncles and aunties of the gal.

Ok enough about the occasion. There was short break for snacks and after that there was a thanks giving session by the brother (who flew down from Australia for the occasion), by the parents and the guru and a 10 minute talk on the dance academy. I asked my colleague if it wasnt a bit too much?Thats when I came to know that this is not a normal feature and in this case the family had the money to do this kind of a show and they did that. Like the way the Yash Chopras and the Karan Johars of bollywood paint the movies with happiness and songs!!!

But tell you what, I was surprised that I sat through that whole 2 hours without getting bored. Thats when I realised that if I was invited to something like this in India, then I wouldnt have even gone for the show. But thats not the case now. I started liking anything even remotely connected to India. There are no bad movies anymore. All songs in all languages are good!

There is a disco here which plays only Tamil songs and one where you can hear only Punjabi/Bhangra songs!!! I can bet that there is nothing like that in Chennai or Chandigarh!!!