10-12-2007 Weddings: American-Punjabi, South-North combo

We have been running too many gigs and have not had time to update our GIG Blog. So I decided to post all of them at once today.

The roughest weekend started all on Thursday, the 11th of October. I roped myself into a situation where I committed myself to applying mehndi to the ladies at the home based sangeet. It was fun but, I got myself home at 12 midnight and I had to work the next day and also DJ their Sangeet on friday night. The ladies were awesome, a couple of them could play tabla and dhol and they sang all night at home and also put together a power-packed performance on Friday night. It was a traditional, typcial sangeet with everyone having fun with live music.

The bride and the groom were an interesting mix of south and north indian. I say interesting because, they both sang a song, with each of them singing in their mother tongue. The songs were Jotheyali Jothe Jotheyali, a Kannada song from the movie 'Geeta' and Jaane do na, which is a Hindi song from 'Cheeni Kam'. Both were composed by Ilayaraja and the Kannada song was the original old song and the hindi song was recently made by him in Cheeni Kam. I sent them the lyrics, original tracks and also the Karaoke track for them to practice. This was a surprise to the entire family and a lot of fun. Oh and yes, we also met a budding Kannada actor Venkatesh Prasad, who is our groom's best friend. He set the dance floor abuzz with his lip sync and dance on "Mere angne mein...". It was fun.

So, I slept much after midnight both on Thursday and Friday and Saturday was the true test for strength. We had to DJ an American-Punjabi wedding in Dearborn on 13th October 2007. We had to rush ourselves over there by 8AM, as I signed up for wedding planning as well. If you are wondering, I have already vowed to myself that I ain't doing this again.

A fresh flower mandap and plenty of Dhol set it to 'perfectly ethnic'. I saw two cool things in this wedding. The couple hired a caricaiturist and an illusionist. The caricaiturist kept the guests away from getting bored, and the illusionist went to each table and showed them some card tricks. I heard people exclaim once in a while. While going home, the illusionist pulled out a business card with flames, he blew the flames and gave it to me. It did smell smoke. Way cool!

The best part was Sachin's live dhol. Sachin is an amazing dhol player and after everyone was out from the party, he played some dhol for me and Vinny too, to dance, while we were tearing down. All in all, it was a lot of fun but, honestly, we are not doing 3 gigs in a weekend ever again.
In all the work I had, I had no pictures shot at any of these events. :-(