0809042030 Another fantastic day at the best job I have ever had.

As if my life wasn’t easy enough. Thursday is the day that I have to be at work early, that is, I have to be at work at half past ten. My rigorous day consists of reading stories to Chinese Catholic School girls. Upon arrival, promptly at 10:20, I was told that there would be a change in my classes today - one class would finish early, the next class was cancelled, and the next class might start late. All this was due to a special event where the whole school was to attend a demonstration of Indian Dancing.


Moving groups of people in an orderly fashion can be a challenge for some organisations. Various armies around the world have resorted to an overly complicated system of orders and commands that involve a lot of shouting, foot stamping and an unnatural amount of self-discipline. None of these fairly ineffective mechanisms are at my disposal when I have to move thirty-odd Chinese Catholic school girls. I don’t shout at them - there is no point in shouting and I believe that doing so is poor leadership. They are not soldiers, most of them never will be, not even Chinese soldiers, so there is no self-discipline, and it has always been a mystery to me why soldiers have to stamp their feet so much. My daunting task was to take these “troops” a total distance of about 100 meters, a distance which the winner of the gold medal for the recent Olympic games managed to cover in 9.69 seconds. I thought that ten minutes should be enough time considering that the students have not had the same rigorous training schedule as an Olympic athlete.

I was late. The last of the year 5 students, being lead by the new Native English Teacher, were greeted by the concerned and lowered eyebrows of the English faculty.

It took a few more minutes to have the entire school seated, shushed and listening for the introduction. An Indian man came out and announced that the long anticipated Indian Dance demonstration would start soon but before it can begin, can all the children take their bags and put them at the back of the room. It had just taken several well trained professionals, some with qualifications in Chinese kick-boxing, fifteen minutes to arrange the students in a precise order. Within two seconds we were back to a room full of pandemonium.

I no longer find it odd when reality does not deliver what I expected. I expected a demonstration of Indian dancing by, oddly enough, Indian dancers resplendent with vibrant colourful saris, tinkling bells attached to their ankles, henna on their hands and feet and that unique cultural red dot on their forehead that looks like they are being targeted by a SWAT team . The Indian dance demonstration consisted of one man, albeit an Indian, wearing a white skivvy as if he was the lesser known and now missing White Wiggle. The skivvy itself was odd - it looked like it had some sort of combined and integrated built in bra. He was very enthusiastic and athletic, he had music, he had rhythm – could he ask for anything more? His demonstration was an astounding repartee of delicately controlled and precisely delivered side-steps, arm flailing and those unique Indian gestures where they make “OK” signs around their face while smiling with their head beset at odd angles. He did this for about three minutes while the Chinese Catholic girls looked on in wide-eyed bewilderment.
He then asked the Chinese Catholic girls to do something totaly unexpected – he asked them to dance.
To understand the awkwardness of the situation one has to understand the conservative, reserved, shy - almost to the point of debilitating, nature of the Chinese Catholic girls. It is one thing to expand their knowledge of other cultures through dance, art and music but it is another situation entirely to ask them to activley participate. There was no way this side of breakfast that the Chinese Catholic girls were ever going to do that dance move that involved wiggling their hips. There was a lot of embarrassed laughing, there was a lot shuffling from one foot to the other, but there wasn't much Indian dancing.

Later, I asked a few students, and I admit that my sample audience was quite small, if they liked the Indian dancing and some replied with a rather blunt “No, it is so ugly.”


References
http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/b/bobbydarin10348/ivegotrhythm335786.html
The picture of the Indian Dancer who did not appear at the demonstation was taken from this add on eBay - http://cgi.ebay.com.sg/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180216025877&indexURL=