Aa ante arangettram*

For the uninitiated, I danced. Yup, you read it right… anyways just for confirmation – “I D-A-N-C-E-D”… for those who cannot believe it, I am sorry to let you down, but that is the truth. Let me tell you how I got myself into this mess… yes, I chased it and caught it. I take full responsibility for the mishap.

The occasion was our farewell and people were all wired up to do something to leave a lasting impression on others… so that everyone will remember them in a different light than what they have been projected over the last 2 years… and I got to know that the easiest way to do this was to dance… wait… before you decide that my post ends here, I did not jump at this point waving my arms shouting “pick me pick me me me”… that is still a long way off…

I come back from this back-breaking trek from harishchandragad and the next evening I learn that one of the guys is dancing in the world famous telugu song “aa ante amalapuram”… since I am a little well informed, I assumed that it is a fun song (and also the way it was sung out to me seemed to convey the same), I decided to watch the practice session and have a good laugh and go to sleep (I was still tired after the trek remember).

So I hungrily follow this bugger to the emba 4 classroom (primarily designed to serve as a lunch room for the emba gang, ideal for dance practices as this room has no furniture). Then there was a signal from above – the lift did not work that day. I should have known that it was an omen for my impending doom. But did I care? My sadistic hormones were on a high and I wanted to derive the maximum pleasure of watching people practice for some stupid gult song. So I walked up all the way – can you believe it – 3 floors on my tired legs…

Then I am sitting there urging people to start on that dance, when they started the reverse psychology technique on me… and the worst part is they hit me with logic… now no engineer or a sane person can argue with logic… logic so profound that it beats all arguments… the logic was “it is all in the mind da… if you think you can do it, you can… you can even climb mount everest without oxygen if you want to… when people who are less athletic than you (omitted part: but have lived all their life doing nothing else but climbing mount everest) can do it, why can’t you?”

So there I am intimidated by a belligerent group of southies who have also bought the logic of the mind thing and I have no choice but to accept. Then I realize that it wud have been easier getting beaten up.

3 pearls of wisdom:
1) never trust your dance teachers if they say that the steps are sooooooo easy
2) never get into contracts/agreements without understanding why there are no other contenders
3) do unto others as you would have them do unto you

We had 2 really patient dance teachers… yup that was on the first day… the second day we were the patients… the amount of learning that went into it is tremendous… in a span of 4 days I would have learnt more dance steps than I had probably learnt in my entire lifetime… it is not easy when you have to move as fast as 2 steps per second… that was when I realized why there were no other competitors to this song… and each of those steps had a zillion other body parts moving in tandem… it was easy doing them all individually… but when it came to integration testing, none of them resembled the original…

Feedback is a very important thing when you are doing anything for the first time and also racing against time to master it. Pinpointed specific feedback is absolutely essential and a solution for course correction is mandatory from the experts. We got a lot of those. An example is – “you are learning fast da (this is P&P funda – give the good news first). But sometimes somewhere some step you are not doing properly. Do them properly.” If you stupidly ask which step and how I should do it, pat comes the reply “I am not sure, somewhere some step…”

Anyways, there was no time for diplomacies, nor was there for proper education. And of course the drop out of the best dancer in the group of 4 helped… as the hotchpotch the rest of us were doing was barely noticeable in relativity. So our teachers stopped complaining too – threatened that they may have more casualties they in fact started praising us. We somehow plodded through more practice sessions, all of us never being in sync at all tries – sleepy and slow, or forgotten steps, or just plain clumsiness… even the dry runs on the stage turned out to be disastrous…

Anyways the d-day arrived and the choreographers had their own dance to worry about and so we were temporarily forgotten… we (the 3 of us) ran through the steps in our minds at all times, as stupidly flailing our arms and legs and occasionally the rest of the body in the middle of the road or in the mess would spoil the element of surprise (don’t even think that we were embarrassed at being the laughed at). And yes we had a short disturbed sleep before leaving for a warm up session before the event – snacks were served.

The event started and happened… nothing much as a rotten tomato found its way to the stage, and we were euphoric hearing the crowd cheer and bliss of ignorance of having goofed up our steps on stage. We just swept the stage like a hurricane – we were on the stage when it was dark and before people could get accustomed to the lights when they came on we were off.

And anyways it was our farewell and people were forgiving – I realized this when I saw the videos. Pray that nobody else realizes it, else my testimonials go for a toss.

PS. Anyone who wants to watch my great performance can ping me and fix up an appointment. I will point out in the video my exact position and time. Of course there will be a contract signed and will be taken to court if the confidentiality is breached.

*Arangetram is a graduation performance that is the part of the traditional format – the Margam ( path) . It reflects the different stages of the dancer’s consciousness. In Tamil Aranga means a raised stage and etram means climbing. It is also called as Rangaprevesha in Kannada where Ranga means stage and prevesha means enter. Arangetram is test for the Sishya ( student) as well as the Guru (teacher) as the Guru’s knowledge and the Sishya’s talent are judged by the Public. So the Arangetram is done only when the Guru feels that the Sishya is capable and talented enough to perform the Arangetram.