Of Gujjus, Dandia and Sanedo

I, like many many Mumbai brought-ups, have known gujjus for as long as I can remember. A lot of important people in my life have been or are gujjus - my project partners from my undergraduate era, my cool dude roomies from cmu days and some of my best friends here in the bay area. Now, although I am very familiar with several Gujarati traditions, customs and can even understand parts of their tongue, back in India, I had never really been able to pass off as one of them. I can recollect how some new folks I would meet during my college days would automatically shift to speaking Hindi or English, from Gujarati, when they would talk to me in the group. Something about my tam-bram-ness I guess was involuntarily forthcoming. I thought this could never change... until I went to attend bay area's biggest dandia event - SEF Dandia 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention center.... Well, almost!

Dressed in a red kurta-pyjama and armed with two bamboo sticks, I stepped, prepared, into the super huge Convention center hall. Throbbing and pulsating with live music, there was an ocean of multi-colored Ghaghra Cholees, kurtas, salwars and sherwanis. Following a durga puja, was a series of garba and dandia numbers. Garba being the harder of the two, joining a garba dancing group takes a little getting used to. It is a rhythmic sequence of steps and rapid turns that I had taken some time to get familiar with last year. So this year was much simpler. I was in-sync with doing garba with a bunch of true blood gujjus. Here's the fun part ... whether it was my ability to move with them easily, or perhaps because I appeared prepared with dandia sticks, I could not tell, but the gujju dude next to me assumed that I spoke Gujarati and started giving me instructions in Gujarati. I followed what I could understand, and by his response I think I might have guessed the meanings right! Finally, after long years, I felt happy -- I had managed to pass off as a gujju!! :-P The feeling was exhilarating!

Alas, everything was good, until Sanedo started! It's an interesting "game", where the song is divided into 4 poetic lines, now for the first three, following gujju instructions from the singers, the whole ocean of dancers all across the floor sit down low on the floor and beat their sticks to the ground making one hell of a racket. Then on the last instruction, they jump high up into the air throwing their arms about, yelling, "SANEDO SANEDO" and dancing furiously, until the singer instructs everyone to sit down again!! We could barely understand what the singers were saying, so just followed the crowd and jumped up after they jumped up. This repeated a number of times.

Still pretending to be a gujju, I asked the dude next to me if he understood the commands, in the best Gujarati I knew. He responded saying its too noisy to hear. But there was too much excitement in my head created by my feigned gujjuness. For some who-knows-what reason, I ended up thinking that I could decipher the singer's instructions on my own in the next round of jumping and dancing. I wanted to be the leader and not a follower! Alas, I so wish I were lucky. Instead of jumping at the 4th instruction, I started off at the third! While the whole hall of dancers were low on the floor, only I was high up in the air, yelling "SANEDO SANEDO" like a crazy maniac. Time slowed down as I felt a thousand eyes turn toward me, several with sympathetic glances, others with sinister HA-HA smiles. All cover was blown. A cocktail of embarrassing emotional currents coursed through my spine. I held time with frozen breath until the singer's last instruction brought up everyone else into the air with the same din I had started off with earlier. Phew!

The cool thing about dandia is mistakes are easily forgotten and forgiven. Back to being myself, I was glad, my fellow dancers feigned, if not truly felt, short term memory loss and continued to dance with me! Sanedo after-all means sneh or love.

Happy Navarathri