Sunday Party – 9/21/14

                The past few days all that my host siblings have talked to me about is this party. “Party! Party! Cake!” is about the only English they seem to know apart from “naughty girl” and “naughty boy.” It’s a weekly celebration in which much of the community takes place (at least most of the Women’s Collective community that is run by Malika-ji). It was a good day of fun and fairly different from what people in the USA might consider as a party.

                The local kids kicked the party off by singing a folksong from South Indian that they had learned in school. In return we performed the Cup Song for them. Steven played the ukulele and everyone else drummed with the cups (everyone was singing). We had a blast singing, but the kids didn’t seem too impressed with our relatively short little song. Afterwards, we all introduced ourselves (including the villagers) and then Malika-ji asked the BYP kids to talk about our families’ histories. Only a few of us ended up sharing because the kids were on the verge of falling asleep listening to relatively boring stories about how our ancestors came to the United States.

                In order to liven up the party a little we started dancing. Now, it was more like a circular conga line without people touching one another, and the dance moves were fairly limited to moving your arms and wrists in beat with the drummers (two men from the village came with their drums to supply the music for the afternoon). The villagers provided the song/chant that went along with the drum music and it was really fun for the first 5-10 minutes, but after a while the repetitive dance moves and singing got to be a little much. I was really thankful for when we then had a snack break. Everyone sat in this giant circle and got banana leaves on which to eat our puri (vaguely like Indian fry bread in AZ) and chana (a chickpea dish).

                Afterwards we participated in another dance, this one led by the women of the village. This involved having two groups of people who circled each other, each group linking arms and moving in step with one another. This dance was more technically complicated and so held my attention for longer than the previous dance, but again after a while it was so repetitive it lost a lot of its appeal. To finish off the party the BYP kids taught the villagers how to dance the Cuban Shuffle.

We were all really self-conscience about how repetitive and unexciting that dance is to outsiders, especially since we had just felt the same about the Indian dancing. After two rotations of the Cuban Shuffle we sheepishly stopped dancing and started to help clean up. Later, Chase and I talked about how dancing, no matter how repetitive it is, is a lot more fun when you’re in a huge group of your friends and everyone actually understands what is going on. The villagers probably felt the same way about our American dance as we had for the Indian ones. How fun or exciting a party is depends much more on the people involved than the activities that are played. I had a phenomenal time connecting with my host family outside of the kitchen and bonding with the rest of India 6.0 as we tried to figure out how to dance like the rest of the villagers.