The art of cheerleading is not that different from Indian classical dance. So, what’s all the fuss about, asks Renuka Narayanan in the Hindustan Times
The furore over imported Indian Premier League (IPL) cheerleaders and that they are ‘indecent’ is incredibly funny, especially because some American foreheads wrinkle exactly the same way when confronted with Indian classical dance. Where’s the comparison between “Rah-rah-rass! Kick’em in the ass!” and “O Appalamswamy Pappadam Perumal, I pine for you, come to me!” you ask? For one, Kansas City Catholics take a dim view of a man dancing Bharata Natyam as a ‘liturgical dance’ to God, especially if the dancer happens to be Father Saju George, an Indian Jesuit. “Ignatius Loyola, founder of the order, would be rolling in his grave,” fumed an offended American on a Catholic blog just a few months ago.
Just as funny are the NRIs at the biggest Carnatic diaspora festival, the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana. Says a Bharata Natyam dancer, back home after a dozen years in the US, “Some parents in Cleveland object to the more ‘sensual’ padams (devadasi love songs) being taught to their daughters. They seem to have retained the mindset of the last century.”
In the 70s, Yasmin Hai’s father launched ‘Operation English’ to turn his Muslim children into model British citizens. Her first-person story in The Guardian, UK:
When we three children were born a few years later, our father instilled in us a very clear idea of what our identity in Britain should be. He strongly discouraged us from taking an interest in our Muslim past and urged us to adopt English people’s ways - even when our white neighbours told us how we were a prime example of how the area was going down the drain. But, as far as my father was concerned, the quicker we became proficient in English ways, the more likely we would prosper here.
["The Making of Mr Hai's Daughter: Becoming British" by Yasmin Hai is published by Little Brown]
In openDemocracy, Arthur Ituassu’s has an internal dialogue with Amartya Sen as he travels through Goa:
“Our food is Goan. It is not Indian, nor Portuguese. It is Goan. We are not Portuguese. We are Indian for sure, but we are also Goan.”
The speaker is Jeanette Afonso, a middle-aged Portuguese teacher in Panaji, the small, historic capital city of the Indian state of Goa. As well as teaching, Jeanette runs a small guest-house at her Cantinho dos Afonsos, a double-yellow house in Panaji’s beautiful Old Quarter. At the end of the street, the little white church of São Francisco de Assis bathes in the light, blessing the neighbourhood and enshrining its history - there is even a crucifix that had given authority to the trials of the Goan inquisition (1560-1774).
For a Brazilian, this is a very interesting place to be. It is so clear that both former colonies of Portugal (Brazil 1500-1882, Goa 1510-1961) are products of a shared history.
The market for on-line matchmaking services is booming for Indians at home and abroad. Neeta Lal at Asia Sentinel:
Neha Kapur, 30, is a type 1 diabetic and that fact alone made it tough to find a marriage partner. For three years, Kapur’s parents searched to no avail for a prospective groom willing to risk a life with their only daughter. But finally the family was directed to diabeticmatrimony.com, a Web site that helped the Kapurs access a databank of eligible diabetic Indian bachelors around the world. Within two months, Kapur whittled down her choice to a London-based software designer to whom she is now happily married.
Unlike the days when an elderly aunt might be called in to solve such problems by using family networks, 9.5 million Indians are doing what Neha did and scouting for spouses in cyberspace this year, up from 5.5 million in 2006, according to the Associated Chambers of Commerce & Industry of India. The figures are hardly surprising considering that India already hosts the fourth largest Internet population in the world - expected to reach 120 million users this year.
The only stars we remember from the 1960s were really hold-overs from the fifties, writes Vir Sanghvi in his column Pursuits at Mint Lounge
If you ask people in the West to rate the most influential decades of the second half of the 20th century, it is the 1960s that they usually remember with the most affection. And even those who don’t actually remember the 1960s (as the cliché goes “if you remember the Sixties, you weren’t really there”) will concede that they represented a watershed in popular culture.
It began with Swinging London (a phrase coined by The Sunday Times but popularized globally by Time magazine) and its explosion of creative talent in such fields as photography, fashion, art and advertising. To this culture/media boom add the influence of The Beatles and Rolling Stones and you had the beginnings of what we now call the rock culture.
Ben Frumin, an American journalist in India, has a piece in the current issue of New York’s Jewish Daily Forward about a Hindi version of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Despite the fact that almost all her knowledge of Jews and Jewish culture comes from a couple of books and the film “Schindler’s List,” Renu Chopra, a slight Hindu woman raised in the north Indian state of Punjab, plays a surprisingly convincing Yente, the nosy shtetl matchmaker in “Fiddler on the Roof.”
“I’ve never met a Jew, never,” Chopra said while wrapping a black shawl around a sparkling gold-and-red kurta during a recent rehearsal. “People [in India] don’t know about Jews. They have no idea about Jews.”
That’s not surprising, considering that there are only about 5,000 Jews in this country of 1.1 billion people, and only about 40 Jews in the capital city of New Delhi. But that didn’t stop an amateur theater company here from staging a Hindi “Fiddler” that’s played five times since this past December, with four more shows scheduled for April.
[Photo: Indian actor Rakesh Gupta, a 48-year-old civil servant, plays Tevye in the Hindi production of 'Fiddler on the Roof.']
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Culture | Tagged: Bharata Natyam, Cheerleaders, devadasi, Indian classical dance, IPL, Kansan City Catholics, Renuka Narayanan, Rukmini Devi Arundale | 
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