Baraat

Jai Mohan's baraat

My colleague Pritish and his elder brother Jai Mohan were married in quick succession, with Aryama and Krati as the respective brides. The family threw a party at the foot of Panchet Hill which lasted about 4-5 days. Because of this arrangement, the entourage from Singapore witnessed each public component of the wedding twice over. Now, overall, the Hindu wedding is a gruelling affair, lasting many days, often extending into the night. Pritish's cousins reported only sleeping two or three hours during the nights. It turned out that the time of the main rituals, involving wedding vows (7 vows from the groom, 5 from the bride), was decided by astronomical measurements, could only be fixed on short notice, and could land in the wee hours in the morning (which happened for Jai Mohan and Krati). 

The wedding vows were preceded by dinner and the processions, first by the groom, then by the bride. The groom's procession was called the baraat and involved a live brass band and vigorous dancing. Pritish's and Jai Mohan's cousins were the stars of the dance floor. Of course, I joined them...

And then afterwards they said I danced so well that I might be and Indian myself, and one of them offered to file paperwork for me to become an Indian citizen, and I became afraid, because I had committed to join them also for reception in Dhanbad without my other colleagues, and they looked as if they might eat me alive when I got there. Fortunately, no one propositioned me for a dance during the after-party, nor made me marry anyone, which put my anxieties at rest.

Swing Dance Meditation: Part 4

Pritish's cousin Mansi reflected to us afterwards that there was an older guy who joined the baraat dance who couldn't dance that well (i.e. he could not do the moves quickly enough). The group slowed down to half-beat pace to match him, which made him feel included. When Mansi saw it go down, she deduced that I had gone through training. She was very thorough.

When Pritish's relatives recounted the moves which I pulled off, I couldn't recall most of it. I did remember copying some of their moves. When the dance-off happened, like with Archit or Vaiibhav, what I did was mooching moves off of my partner, spicing it up a little in some way, and throw it back at him. I hadn't trained for this — this was Bollywood dancing, heavy on upper-body movements, while Lindy Hop is more about footwork — but the way this was done felt like when I was dancing with coach Marsha Folkoff: very improvisational, very communicative and very freeform, not restricted to a particular system of dance.

People come to the dance floor with different mentalities, and their mentalities ineffably influence the way they dance. Broadly, there are people who say "I know all the moves and dance them well" and there are people who say "I want to be happy and to make other people happy". This latter category are people of my tribe, and I will seek them out and learn from them.