Stumbling Into A Story

You know how I have said that there is no cultural programming in this town? I have to take that back. This week, I saw an ad in the paper for Shilparamam, Hyderabad's local crafts village, where folks can sell their work directly to tourists in a central location without getting ripped off (or at least that's the idea). They were hosting a weeklong workshop called "Unity in Diversity" where scholarship students from all over India learned traditional arts (visual, plastic, and performative). The ad also mentioned that each evening there would be "cultural programmes" from 6:30-8 pm. Of course Sion had to work late Monday, so we went on Tuesday, the last scheduled day.

The students of course were kids ages 10-15 or so. For some reason I assumed the students would be adults, apprenticing or something. Nope; schoolkids! We crashed their graduation ceremony.

As we were arriving (around 7ish) an Aussie couple was leaving; the woman was very happy to see us, and was further thrilled to learn that she could have a salwar kameez tailor made (too much bust and booty for Indian sizes) but the dude was clearly annoyed at the whole thing and wanted to go. She wanted to stay and see if there *was* going to be any dancing. There were at least 20 kids dressed up in costumes that suggested there would indeed be dancing. We were warned that we'd be filmed.

At first we stayed on the sidelines (during the handing out of certificates). Apparently, I have a soft spot for graduations. Who knew? Blame my job and my five younger sibs. We were urged by one of the guys that worked there to sit in the front row, so we eventually did. And yes indeed, we got our pictures taken several times, and we got filmed too. I guess we'll be the "international visitors" in the documentation they put together. It was cute and dorky and the kids sang awkwardly, and then there was a comedy skit where two ten year old boys pretended to be drunk. It ended with a girl with a broom beating one of them. The truly funny part was the microphone malfunction; the main drunk kid had a body mic that he had grab by the corner of his shirt for it to work. And yes: drunks do talk to their shirts. So it worked. After this, there was a dance performance with styles representing all the states the kids were from; I think they said 12 or 16 styles were represented. And there were outfits! And the music was quite good because it was performed by the teachers. Cap it all off with a crazy short Keralese shadow puppet show.
Who says there's no culture in Hyderabad?