The Hindu Business Line : When dance turns into mourning

WITH Manmohan's Government completing one year in office, I'm sure there would be some singing and dancing among the rank and file in Delhi, though the Left may choose to be left out of the fun. If you come down a few notches on the latitude, you'd realise that nautch has stopped in the West, because of a bar on dance bar, with a new law dancing abruptly in place, anguishing many bar bar, the more they think about it.

Dance girls are away protesting, so what remain are only silent ankle bells that are no longer jingling, music that is not playing and confused customers drowning their worries behind closed doors with more than usual doses, because there are no dainty gyrations for them to sync with.

Let me not join issue with those who exult that the city has suddenly become more moral owing to the strict culture-copping. Nor, would I like to question the wisdom of a State that seems to have but a singular obsession of shackling one of the most ancient of human expressions. Rather, I'd look at some wise words on dancing.

"Life is like dancing," said Don Miguel Ruiz. "If we have a big floor, many people will dance." Before dancing in Mumbai you need to check the new Ordinance (or is that Ordi-dance?) that perhaps defines what dance is, and lists where all one may perform the otherwise objectionable act. "You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star," is a Friedrich Nietzsche quote. But there seems to be enough of chaos in the sarkar.

When people asked Henry Youngman the secret of his long marriage, he explained: "We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays." A quip, that is, in favour of the activity for domestic balance, even as democratic imbalance may tend to concur with George Bernard Shaw who said that dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

"A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance." Thus goes a line in the Old Testament. "To every thing there is a season," it would add, but I doubt if those in the Mantralaya can see reason in the saying. "The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning," is from Lamentations, again in the holy book, to suit the sombre mood of the affected.

After we raise a whole generation dinning into them that dancing is a suspect exercise, we may call in the old woman from France as in a Mother Goose rhyme to teach grown-up children to dance. Result: "But they were so stiff, She sent them home in a sniff."

Henry Ellis said that dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, and the most beautiful of the arts. But Vilasrao seems to say, "I will wish thee never more to dance," borrowing a line from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost.

"Come, come, we are friends: let's have a dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts and our wives' heels," is a tempting invitation in Much Ado About Nothing, valid outside Maharashtra, though.

For, if "She sings like one immortal, and she dances," as in Pericles, she'd only invite penalty under the Bombay Police Act.

"I should fear those that dance before me now," said Apemantus in Timon of Athens, and those that dance should fear the law before them now.

Let me wrap with a Molière quote: "When someone blunders, we say that he makes a misstep. Is it then not clear that all the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill our history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing."

Should we not, therefore, teach our legislators some dancing? A skill that may come in handy in floor-crossing.

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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