So you think you can Dance

It was at a wedding in Delhi recently that I met Rajender,35,a Mumbai-based dance choreographer who,like me,is a professional wedding goer (I make the movies,he chooses the dance moves). Rajender,tall but portly,deeply hennaed,wearing a shirt two sizes too small for him was busy making a few 20-somethings shriek with laughter at his outrageous moves to Munni Badnaam Hui. To copy his alternately sexy and absurd gestures,you need to be either really drunk or as uninhibited as Lady Gaga. But Rajender was cracking the whip,especially on the men,who were getting it all wrong. It would be a task to just make sure they don’t look daft and uncoordinated.

Rajender is a Kathak exponent who drifted into choreographing weddings. He has natural grace,he just has to watch a song once,to imitate it perfectly. He tells me he flies between Mumbai,Delhi and Kolkata during the season (October to March),and plans the dance sequences for different families. He is a busy,extremely sought after guru: he recently choreographed a wedding in Jaipur,another in Jodhpur for another industrialist and is heading to Bali for a destination wedding in April. And he has charm. He ribs the bride and groom,his occasionally lewd moves ease the tension (yes,weddings are high stress affairs) and for those 10 days he unintrusively becomes a part of the family. He tells me he adores weddings. After five days of regular practice and after the sangeet is a spectacular success,Rajender spent the rest of the evening,dancing,non stop. It’s an unconventional career,fuelled by the ever growing scale of weddings in India and Rajender is lucky enough to be making a great living doing what he enjoys most.

At another sangeet rehearsal,an assortment of 50-something women,the bride’s mom’s friends and some relatives are busy gyrating to Shiela ki Jawani. The instructor is a petite young girl,yelling at them to not forget to smile while dancing. About sangeet performances at weddings,they’re fun to watch if they’re crisp and short,and a riot when the steps go haywire. But there’s a star lurking somewhere,in all of us,and those 10 minutes of fame are funny and cheesy. It’s all good as long as the performers keep the self indulgence in check.(hutkayfilms@gmail.com)