I was invited to an Indian party yesterday. My friend Shashi invited me to a singing contest organized by the members of the Indian Association, an NGO that groups all the indian citizens living in Caracas, who are mostly employees of trasnationals like Siemens, P&G, Schlumberger or ChevronTexaco. It was AWESOME, since I love indian culture, I love indian food, I love Hindipop (esp. Alisha Chinai) and Bollywood movies (Saif Ali Khan, Akshay Kumar, Priyanka Chopra, Dimple Kapadia, John Abraham, Dino Morea, Lara Dutta, Aamir Khan, Shilpa Shetty, Abhishek Bachchan, Boman Irani, Kareena Kapoor and of course, megababe Aishwarya Rai are among my favourite indian movie stars). 
Oh, I forgot to say that my boss is indian, one of my workmates is indian, and there are 9 students from India in school, so...you get the picture. One funny thing -Apart from an american married to an indian lady, I was the only non-indian invited to the place, hehehe :-D
Almost everybody was wearing shalwar kameez, saris, kurtas, kurtis or anything similar whose name I dunno. But still, everybody looked proudly Desi, hehehe.
The contest was divided in six groups, each one of them had to guess, mimick and sing some bollywood songs, and that, to be honest, is quite difficult because India produces more than 800 movies a year, and most of them are musicals, with an average of 30 songs per movie, so go figure how many songs the organizers (Shashi, Richa, Priyanka, and some other folks whose names I can't remember ATM) could choose from! The contest itself was quite fun, take a look at the photos.
Oh, I forgot to say that my boss is indian, one of my workmates is indian, and there are 9 students from India in school, so...you get the picture. One funny thing -Apart from an american married to an indian lady, I was the only non-indian invited to the place, hehehe :-D
Almost everybody was wearing shalwar kameez, saris, kurtas, kurtis or anything similar whose name I dunno. But still, everybody looked proudly Desi, hehehe.
The contest was divided in six groups, each one of them had to guess, mimick and sing some bollywood songs, and that, to be honest, is quite difficult because India produces more than 800 movies a year, and most of them are musicals, with an average of 30 songs per movie, so go figure how many songs the organizers (Shashi, Richa, Priyanka, and some other folks whose names I can't remember ATM) could choose from! The contest itself was quite fun, take a look at the photos.
Then the food came, mostly North Indian food and not Southern Indian food as I am used to (my boss is from Kerala and Shashi is from Karnataka) -but excellent anyway!
At some point, I started to think of the differences and similarities between Indian/Hindustan/Afghan and Middle Eastern (Arabic, Jewish, Georgian, Turkish, Greek, Persian, Armenian, Kurdish, Tajik) culture.. they're very similar in many aspects, perhaps because Indian culture was heavily influenced by the persians during the Mughal Empire and hence the common stuff:
- Passion for music and similar stringed (sitar, oud, bouzouki) wind (duduk, düdük, ney, pungi) and percussion (tabla, tonbak, dounbek, darbouka) instruments
- Passion for food: rice, the bread (naan, porotta, paratha, pide, pita), kabab/kebab/kabob, ambode/falafel, youghurt, and of course, spicy food and pork is forbidden and dirty as s**t
- Passion for life: Among other things I noticed, people is VERY noisy when celebrating and when competing and someone makes a mistake, hehehe
- Passion about their beliefs: being Jewish, Hindu, Coptic Orthodox, Sikh, Sunni Muslim, Assyrian/Chaldean Orthodox, Shiite Muslim, Armenian Apostolic, Eastern Orthodox Christian, Ibadi Muslim, Syrian Christian of Kerala, Bahá'í, Parsi, Jain, Melkite Catholic, Syriac Orthodox, Armenian Catholic or Maronite Catholic, all of us are as attached to our roots as to our beliefs, which are an integral part of it
Definitely we are part not just of a language continuum but a culture continuum, that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal, and from the Caucasus to the Arabian Sea. One can tell how the language, culture, food, clothes and physical appearance slowly changes from East to West and from North to South, but the essence remains :-)
Look at this video - too bad I forgot to turn the mike on!
and this other video:
Oh, and a photo of the winners, of course! !מזל טוב
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