Dancing the night away

On Wednesday evening several parties were held for different departments. Since I am here in a Product Development capacity, I attended their party. Although scheduled to begin at 730p, we Americans arrived at the club at 8p and we were the only ones there, but the rest of the group showed up seemingly en masse about 10 minutes later. The venue was a quaint little one-room club with a bar on one end of the room and tables & chairs around the perimeter. The middle of the floor was reserved for dancing, and boy, do these Indian men DANCE! Before the dancing began we bellied-up to the open bar for Kingfisher beer, Blue Star Shiraz, and hard liquor by the glass. Then we played a couple rather silly party games, but we all went along in the spirit of good clean fun. And THEN they turned the music up... and up... and up. And the guys DANCED!! and DANCED!! and DANCED!! Unfortunately, pictures being worth what they are, it is a real bummer that I don't have any to share of this auspicious occassion because if you've never been to an Indian dance club, my words will not do the dance style justice in the least.

Because Indian society is still quite conservative especially in relation to young women, it is rare to see a young Indian woman in a dance club. For this reason the two young, unmarried women developers at the party were pretty uncomfortable with all the dancing going on. But the men were completely undeterred by the lack of girls to dance with. In fact, they were so at ease dancing in the midst of the large group of men, it was obvious the norm for dance clubs is great multitudes of men just letting loose and dancing their hearts out and enjoying the company of their friends & brothers.

The dance style itself deserves some words: frenetic and frantic being two that come to mind most readily. Like American dance music, Indian dance music is very loud and fast with a strong beat, and the men move their entire bodies - arms, legs, heads, feet - in vigorous gyrations, sometimes it seemed with little regard for the beat. The craziest thing about this wild dance was the most mild-mannered guys from the office were the most intense dancers!

The dancing was a lot of fun to watch, so I thought it would be fun to participate as well. And since I'm 8000 miles from home, and, as the saying goes. "what happens in Pune stays in Pune" (or something like that), out onto the dance floor I ventured. The first odd thing about venturing onto this dance floor was I really was venturing out there by myself. Like I mentioned, women are not seen at the dance club too much, so no one was really inviting me out on the floor, but the music was loud beat was good, so to the dance floor I went. And it was a lot of fun. Of course. I had a great time (2 glasses of wine and a Kingfisher didn't hurt), and when Ritesh came looking for me at 10:30 saying he & John were heading back to the hotel, I reluctantly followed lest I get left behind.

What an experience!