Dear Nidhi M.,
Thank you very much for sending Sepia Mutiny a story idea via our tipline three hours ago. It was so kind of you to think of us as you went about your day.
Since you have demonstrated your generosity already, I feel emboldened enough to wonder if you’d be willing to go a bit further in showing your devotion to this mutinous cause. Do you bleed Sepia? If so, would you graciously consider donating one of your eyes to me? I lost mine when I clawed them out, after watching the link you helpfully enclosed with the following succinct statement:
Nike teaming up with 24 hour fitness mixing and mucking up classical indian dances with bollywood and strange robotic aerobic moves.
Mein Gott, that’s almost poetic. You were right. And now, I am in so much pain because of it. I’d gouge away at the intern’s face, but she took one look at me and ran screaming to Rajni the lemur’s room. At least she didn’t have to watch Jamie King train three mostly wooden dancers in his “Rockstar workout” of “far-East funk”. Nor did she have to hear his priceless wisdom, which I feel I must contradict fervently after watching this entire fiasco:
There are no rules. If you’re feeling the music, you can’t go wrong.
TRUST me. You can indeed go wrong. Especially when you employ that uber-abused cliche which has appeared on browndating dot com so many times, my friends have turned it in to part of a drinking game (“OMG, he prefaced it with ‘good blend of’…DOUBLE SHOT!”).
Of course, I am referring to that bi-cultural, directional claptrap which automatically disqualified all otherwise-promising candidates from suitable debauchery; Mr. King’s spin on it didn’t prevent the gagging, not after what I saw. “East meets West on the dance floor”? Come to any random desi party and you can abuse “South” as well, i.e. “when East meets West on the dance floor, two rabidly horny underage hormones often move South in order to simulate an act which MummyPapa would spank them unconscious for, for even pondering”. Anyway. When this man who has choreographed Madge exhorts us to “just get out there and show your Bollywood style!”, I don’t think he realizes what fresh hell he is inviting the world to suffer through by doing so.
Chick Pea? Are you out there? Have you done your surgical rotation yet??? That faint, scratchy squawking you hear is Abhi, frantically paging you to the bunker’s painfully rustic OR. Go, scrub your hands already! My anesthesiologist Dr. Walker is already prepping me for surgery. As for the rest of you, just know this and remember it well– when you dance like that, you make the baby Jesus cry. Worse than that, you also piss off our Desidancer.
Blindly yours,
A N N A
:+:
(more pictures after the jump, click to enlarge them…if you dare)
Dont make me go medieval on your ass
me go
…not as much as I’ve missed all of you. Sloppy, lip-gloss-leaving kisses on all of your perfect cheeks– some of you have been so sweet in these comments, I feel like it’s my birthday.
No, Anna. Please. NO!!!!
Too late.
Go Anna, it’s your birthday. . .
please, someone, make it stop playing in my head. As if Nike mock-desi soup wasn’t enough. . .
careful, ANNA, Jai will volunteer to administer birthday spanks…
DesiDancer, considering the mood I’m in (if you’ve been following SM recently you’ll know why), I might leave some pretty large bruises. Which wouldn’t be a good idea.
As a nice sheltered London boy I didn’t know there was such a thing as “birthday spanks”, but I guess any excuse to adminster such “discipline” is valid eh…..
(Thank you for your continuing attempts to cheer me up. You’re very kind.)
I just got some of these “birthdayspanks” last friday…its way better than punches. way better
mi amor, you’ve obviously never laid eyes on my callipygian splendor. that right thurrr is one deeeluxe cushion, my friend. i’d wager that any birthday swats would injure your underlying soft tissue before mine. 😉
So I see a word I don’t recognise. I go to dictionary.com to look it up. I find out this word means:
I suddenly discover a whole new meaning to my life, to insert this word into conversations whenever I can, because it is as curvacious a word as the thing it describes. I think this has taken over as my favorite word in the English language, which used to be ‘Serendipity’, followed closely by ‘luminous’ and in third place ‘lepidoptery’.
But now I know what callipygian means, I am in love with that word. Please write a post featuring this word in the headline.
Sepia Mutiny does not waste your time.
Anna,
If I was in a better mood I’d probably crack some joke about how SM should build a secondary temple in your honour too, but I’ve decided I’ve already saturated this blog’s archives with too much badmaashi in the past. No doubt you’d also threaten to kick the crap out of me with those 10-foot-long legs of yours.
No pain no gain, as Razib would say.
I’ve decided that you are a total gentleman; to me, you always have been. I am filled with disbelief that this fact might have changed in the month that I’ve been chained to my desk at ye olde start-up and thus, away from these knotty threads.
There can never be too much badmaashi. There can be too much “dark vs. fair”, “Indian vs. South Asian” and “Brahmin vs…well, no one, b/c our entire readership is well-born”. But too much naughtiness? That’s like saying “too much sex” or “too much bhindi/vendeka”.
Only if you’d enjoy it, old boy. 😉
Callypgian? ASS-tounding word usage.
ahem…may I? I may. Here goes. Who am I?
“How apposite.”
Hee. 🙂
rolls eyes before affectionately punching SJM
There needs to be some sort of emoticon for this, so universal is it among the ladies. 😉
p.s. A N N A, blog, baby, blog, we meeesss you!
Oh you have no idea ANNA I seriously missed you for just that reason. Poor Jai has been getting clobbered by some loon for personal masochistic pleasure and other SM gods have been sitting on the sideline smirking because it may be funny to some but it wasn’t funny to many of us. We need some standard rules of conduct around here and unfortunately it hasn’t been so lately. And no one bitchslaps better than you.
that’s b/c it’s a bitch who is doin’ the slapping. 😉
oy, my poor little mutineers. you’re making me feel terrible for neglecting my prrrecious sepia baby. and i can’t even react like an actual parent and bribe you with some blinking, shrieking, over-priced toy to compensate. hmmm.
ANNA, we’ve missed you and we’re lonely. Are you feeling guilty yet? 🙁
-but if you bring us a nice present when you come back home, we’ll forgive you. And hold Salil down while you punch him 😉
Heed my words when I tell you that THAT is NO WAY to punish SJM. That would be positive reinforcement. 😉
The last time I saw anything so incredibly camp was at Club Kali in London about a month ago, where a white guy in a full gharara did the entire routine to Maahi Ve, and followed that up with Nimbura.
The instructor teaching it is kinda hot though. I volunteer to spank him thoroughly in order to teach him a lesson about using crappy music to promote brown pride. I am the expert on Pride. 🙂
Normally, I’d dispatch you to do just that but aren’t you going to be…a bit…BUSY soon? 😉
Why you allays gotta tell, woman? That was shaping up to be waaaay fun!
Anna,
That’s extremely kind of you, thank you so much. Coming from someone who, until relatively recently, had read pretty much every post I’d ever submitted on SM during the past year, your opinion also carries a great deal of weight.
Very true 😉 But my concern is that this gives people the wrong idea about me being some kind of “soft target”, especially if they’re relatively new arrivals to the blog.
I haven’t changed at all; if anything, I’ve been even more /restrained than I’ve previously been in such situations. You can go through the various archived posts where I’ve participated and read the evidence for yourself (here’s the most recent example, although there are numerous others).
It is truly staggering that the person concerned has not been banned a long time ago, and it is beyond me why SM is indulging them like a spoilt child when other people exhibiting such behaviour on this blog are rapidly removed. You cannot allow people to use SM as their own personal playground where they pick random targets to be attacked for manufactured, practically-hallucinatory grievances and as a punchbag for their strawman arguments.
I think that what you said a few weeks ago is accurate; some people come here as a way to get “attention” because they cannot do so in real-life, and because in the “real world” they can’t find an audience for their bullshit. You can imagine how pathetic their lives must be if they have nothing better to do than harassing total strangers across the internet. Cowardly doesn’t even begin to describe it.
JOAT’s point is well-made; there are already some “rules” in place but these need to be enforced firmly and without exception. I don’t understand what is funny about watching some psycho bunny-boiler loser harass other regular commenters — and enough people here have been on the receiving end of this childish nonsense across multiple threads — unless the person concerned is being kept on purely for the supposed comedy value like MoorNam was, ie. they’re the unsuspecting butt of the joke.
Some very vicious and twisted behaviour has been occuring on SM recently, and you need to exterminate the vermin before your website is poisoned even further.
Sin – are you …. pregnant ?
🙂
This bellydancer (who is Black by the way), thought it was fine as hip hop with some Indian dance hand gestures, but the Pharonic King Tut arm pose which we in bellydance land classify as “fakelore” rather than folklore, had nothing to do with Indian Dance and looked like they threw in some fakey Egyptian move.
BTW, we bellydancers love Bollywood since we get tons of our costuming stuff from sari shops.
Leave this crap alone, go watch Neena and Veena!
Ennis (del Mar?), unless someone knocked me up when I wasn’t paying attention…
Actually, the truth is…I’m going to straight camp. Well, at least, ex-gay camp. Which particular sequence of words in and of itself makes my mind boggle.
😉
What angers me most is that Nike is stepping above and beyond the cultural appropriation line and using fusion as a marketing means to seduce the West. It makes me SICK to think there are people out there who now feel connected to some kind of SouthAsian/Brown culture because they bought a new workout outfit and are practicing half-assed-classical-moves. Just because people are integrating dance moves from a specific Indian culture does NOT mean that Indians or South Asians have “arrived”.
Awesome video links y’all, but I’m about to turn it up to 11.
Dancing Indian midget + 80s Breakdancing = Snakes on a Plane!
This posting was mentioned by attendee “Anjali” at the dance conference “Kathak at the Crossroads” during a panel on the cultural context(s) of dance in India and abroad.
The song playing in the trailer is Party in Bombay by Mentor Kollectiv featuring Hard Kaur.
Ravi the Lurker,
Were you at the conference? I was there too, it was an amazing time, no? Are you involved in dance?
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