Moses of the Dance Floor

There are some things in life that I’ll never figure out – quantum mechanics, women and ‘the beat’. All my life, I’ve been asked to listen to ‘the beat’, feel ‘the beat’, allow ‘the beat’ to take over – and my dancing problems would vanish like Kate Moss’s waistline. Yet I’ve never been able to figure out this mysterious thing called ‘the beat’. Yeah, I can hear the music, sure – but ask me to move to ‘the beat’ and I’m hopelessly lost. More often than not, I end up being laughed at for moving opposite to ‘the beat’, when I don’t even know what ‘the beat’ is!

Now don’t get me wrong here – it’s not as if I lack all basic social skills or that I’m an engineer. I’m not very talkative, but I can speak well when needed; I’m not the networking sorts that makes friends wherever they go, yet I have enough friends I can count upon; I may not be the most fashionable dresser, but neither will I land up looking like the Village People – in other words I’m pretty much your average guy in most respects. Yet when it comes to dancing I could make even Arnold Schwarzenegger look like a graceful ballerina. I’m like the Moses of the dance floor – people on both sides of me will part away in a sea of laughter when I take to the floor.

Thankfully, I am well aware of this shortcoming and have ensured that this sort of a scenario does not arise too often. Yet, there has been many an occasion after being a few drinks down when I’ve been coaxed/cajoled/bullied into joining the dancing, even though the most I manage is the ‘stand-in-one-place-and-move-your-hands-and-feet-around-a-bit’ variety of dancing; all the while looking stiff and uncomfortable with this ‘I’d-rather-be-facing-a-Siberian-tiger-in-the-Tundra-wasteland’ expression on my face. In order to better avoid this eventuality, though, I have tried to identify the categories of people I need to be wary of.

The first category is the ‘overzealous-but-cannot-dance’ type. This is a person whose dancing skill would only be marginally better than mine, but he does not let that stop him from rushing to the dance floor. This is the type of chap with no inhibitions whatsoever, the sort who always likes to be the centre of attention at any gathering. Predominantly, fellows in this category tend to be loud and boisterous – which is fine, except for the fact that they will not rest until every single person has been on the dance floor at least for a while. Often, the people in this category tend to dance bhangra whatever be the genre of music that’s playing, and are at their best when the music is Punjabi. Largely, this category comprises almost exclusively of guys.

The second category that I look out for tends to be the ‘eagerly enthusiastic, all-inclusive’ type. People in this group tend to enjoy dancing every now and then and are often pretty good at it. While they don’t go overboard with the whole dancing business, they take it as their duty to make you dance, and make it seem as if theirs as well as your evening would remain unfulfilled if you did not dance. While they would not just push you on to the dance floor like the overzealous type would, they would keep pestering you, accuse you of being boring and even say that you look ‘cute’ (when they actually mean comical) while dancing, just to get you on the dance floor. At which point they’ll promptly start laughing at your attempt at dancing while at the same time encouraging you to hang around and try to tell you to follow ‘the beat’. As many of you would’ve guessed, mostly girls fall into this category.

One category that I know I have nothing to fear from is the ‘totally absorbed in dancing’ sort. These are the ones who would jump on to the dance floor when everyone else is thinking “Should I be the first one on the dance floor? I sure feel like dancing, but the floor is empty – maybe I should wait until the crowd picks up and it’s more happening”. These are the ones who do not care whether they have someone to dance with or not - you might often spot them dancing away on their own next to the speaker, or they’ll form their own little group – 2-3 girls/guys dancing with each other, oblivious to everything else, first on the floor and the last to leave. At a non-dance environment, these are the sort of people who would break into dance at the slightest of provocations, and sometimes without any provocation!

I am, however, eternally thankful that a craze as big as the Macarena has not taken a hold of the collective consciousness of humanity since the one time that it did happen. I have seen the world go crazy a lot of times in the last couple of decades – the rise of boy bands, ‘80s fashion, Iraq war, etc – but none as baffling and painfully annoying as the Macarena. There you were, sitting at a normal get-together – when suddenly EVERYONE gets up in excitement and starts dancing to the Macarena with steps (that looked like squirrels performing aerobics) that everyone seemed to know except for me! To date, that happens to be my all-time MOST annoying song, and has left me strongly in favour of banning songs-that-have-their-own-dance-steps.