For those who didn’t follow what the title means, I’ll give you another clue. Bangalore, where I am currently doing my PS-II, is well known for it. Everyone, on knowing that I am in Bangalore, asks me whether I have been to one yet. Yes, you guessed it right, its DISCO. I hadn't been to one in Bangalore yet, and had also not been
under one yet in BITS. For those who didn’t get my sad joke, the latter disco I am referring to is the disciplinary committee in BITS.
Such an important occasion of my life started rather abruptly with no prior preparations. Not an ideal start I must say. My friend called me up to tell me about the plan just when I was leaving my office one Friday evening. I was dead tired. No, not from the hectic work of PS-II, which is very relaxing by the way, but from my hour-long gym session. However, I agreed readily thinking it was a great opportunity to break my disco-trips-duck.
I rushed home to get ready. Now I was faced with a big dilemma of what I was going to wear. Shirt? Nopes, too formal. T-Shirt. Nah, cause I only had BITS t-shirts. Boy aren’t there many of them!! Not that it’s a crime to wear a BITS t-shirt to a disco. But I guess a t-shirt from an engineering college doesn’t make a good impression at a disco. So finally I settled for a plain shirt.
I rushed to meet my fellow party animals. All were dressed in their ‘Friday best’. We were very excited. We practiced our dancing so that we wouldn’t look like novices. The only steps we knew well were the mass steps we did in our Zephyr dance. (click
here and
here to view the videos) There was lightening in the sky when we left the house. I smiled. Not because I thought that someone was taking my picture to capture the moment for posterity. I smiled thinking about how even the rain gods were playing their part in getting us into the mood with a dazzling display of lights. We didn’t have a chauffeur driven limousine to take us to the disco. So we settled for a BMTC bus. The bus was quite long and it had a driver. Some similarities to the limousine there. [:P]
Off we were on our historic trip. We couldn’t wait to get there and in our excitement we got off at an earlier stop. So we had a long walk to warm us up for some serious dancing to fast paced music. Finally we reached our destination. You should have seen the sheer delight in our eyes. The sign that said OXYGEN in brilliant blue neon lights mesmerized all of us. We quickly paid for the passes and entered.
The room was dark and smelt of stale cigarette smoke. Severe lack of oxygen despite the name. I could make out the silhouettes of people sitting at tables. There was a huge LCD TV on a wall. And some ‘shas bahu’ serial was going on Sony TV. Hold on mate!!! Was this a disco or some family restaurant? A major anti climax I must say. I was expecting some steamy videos to be running. The dance floor was empty. No one was dancing. And the DJ was playing some sad music like a moron. We moved into the next room hoping for something better. It appeared like a gambling den. Some weird guys and not so weird gals were sitting in some, to put it mildly, unusual positions. I was flabbergasted. So this is what a disco is eh? A family room and a gambling den. I decided to drown my sorrows with alcohol. I looked at the menu card. The prices were prohibitive. So I settled for a bottle of Kingfisher Strong Beer. I sincerely hoped that the king of good times would rescue me from this bad time.
The beer combined with the smoke lightened my head. I wanted to dance. I felt it was the time to disco!! My fellow dejected party pals agreed. I went and told the DJ, “
Hey Mr. DJ, put a record on, I want to dance with my baby!!!” Quoting Madonna there from one of her hit songs. The DJ looked around searching for my baby. I gave him a stare and said, “
In the end it doesn’t even matter…. If I have a baby or not!!!” He must have thought either I was a hardcore music fan or more likely I was totally zonked. I left him with a final statement “
Please don’t stop the music.”
By then many people had come onto the dance floor. I did all my AH2 dance performance steps. All the people were loo
king at us with admiring looks. Ah, all the attention we were getting gave us a heady feeling. I almost expected some of them to ask us for autographs. One drunken dude came up to us and told us we weren’t dancing properly to Shakira’s ‘hips don’t lie’. He said he would teach us and we learnt some very complex Latino steps. I never knew I could dance like that. Then there was this group of Ranbir Kapoor impersonators. Unfortunately for everyone no Sawariya songs were played and we didn't witness the towel scene!! [:P]. And there was this very romantic couple that danced waltz when the DJ was playing rock music!! I guess besides being blind, love is deaf too.
Sometime, while dancing a little too enthusiastically to Koi Kahe, I slapped a guy by mistake. Luckily he didn’t realize what had hit him. I quickly looked the other way not wanting to leave the place on a stretcher. As time wore on the dance floor got a little too packed for liking. We couldn’t dance freely. We decided to leave when we could shake it no more.
No sooner we left the disco it began to pour. We tried to run for shelter but then thought, why bother? This was our first disco visit and we may well enjoy every bit of it. Bangalore’s party circuit just had some very cool members added to it. Some years down the line I’ll remember this day and many other days and say to myself, “
those were the best days of my life”.
I wrote dis article for the college magazine BITSAM.
