The TamBrahm Spunk (2)

My  TamBrahm friend’s sister got married to a Punjabi! If you are a TamBrahm you’ve already phased out into a state of extreme shock.

Because of course, chamathu kondai isn’t technically allowed to choose the person with whom she is going to spend the rest of her life!

If you have no idea of what I am talking about, click here to first absorb the spirit!

Of all the functions of a not-so-big but fat wedding, I most enjoyed myself at the Sangeet…

Usually a Punjabi version of a bridal shower, a Sangeet is where the bride’s family and friends celebrate with music and dance…(Sangeet in Hindi translates to Music!)..and the groom’s side have their own version of it too. But most weddings now have a common Sangeet with the whole crowd together. What was originally a Punjabi affair has now become a pan-Indian tradition with every couple wanting her Sangeet to be a grand affair with a DJ invited to entertain people with his loud music followed by a fancy dinner party! And this transition is all thanks to Bollywood movies!

But the Sangeet at this particular wedding was legit because half the crowd (or maybe more than that) was Punjabi! And Punjabi Sangeets are fun because there is music, dance, lots of teasing, good food and booz… On the other end of the spectrum is a TamBrahm wedding where booz is not even to be thought of, forget consumption!

So this unique bunch of people united to celebrate the grand wedding of a Punjabi munda to a chamathu pon kondai! And it was like reliving the Chetan Bhagat novel ‘2 States’ (awfully written but a true account of what an inter-state marriage can look like) which was also adapted into a Bollywood movie by the same name!

Me and my friends walked into the Sangeet with an awkward feeling about what to expect..We thought the TamBrahms will sit in one corner sipping at their filter kaapi while the huge Punjabi aunties and uncles would destroy the dance floor with both, their enthusiasm and their weight! Or worse, we thought some chamathu kondai in a pattu pavadai will be forced to re-perform what she learnt in the Bharathnatyam/Carnatic music class last week!

We weren’t off the mark entirely! The first half of our expectation came true…the mamas and mamis were too uptight to get on the dance floor. But there were no sudden thalams or mudras emerging out (thank the gods for that!). The Punjabi crowd, on the other hand, was going crazy to the tunes of recent Bollywood songs and their dhol beats! And we were a part of the same crowd…one minute we were dancing with one aunty and the other minute some other uncle was attracting our attention to his moves. From ‘Baby doll main sone di’ to ‘Badtameez dil’, all the popular songs had us grooving…

And Suddenly…

One mama broke the ice…He walked to the DJ and had a quick conversation. Suddenly, the famous beats of ‘Naka muka’ blended in…and a few more boys laughed and walked up to the stage. Before we knew it, they broke into an impromptu gig. And within minutes, the TamBrahm crowd was dancing with uninhibited spirit. And while we wasted a few precious moments laughing and cheering and flabbergasted at the sudden turn of events, we quickly recovered from shock and danced our hearts away with the crowd that no more seemed a quiet, uptight, inhibited bunch.

And thus my view of TamBrahms changed…

for a while…

…until I went to the next wedding (this time the chamathu kondai married the mapillai her parents chose for her) and witnessed nothing but jangiris and payasams and madisar mamis and pattu veshti mamas talking with a background score of the nadhaswaram and the melam!