Come, get drenched!

Doha does not quite qualify as a fun place. Well, depends on what your idea of 'fun' is, though. I am plainly toying with the very 'popular' notion of fun here. A friend tells me that in 2008 this place was yet to experience the smattering of ‘happening’ things that Doha is slowly opening its doors to today. The transition is slow and easy, like the pace of the city, but, ‘definite’.  So the expat society here, who is a majority of the city’s population, very earnestly takes it upon them to head to anything that comes under the parameters of ‘fun’. Come weekend, and lo and behold! A convoy of land cruisers and land rovers would trail through the sand and dust hoping to experience a little respite from an otherwise work/money-driven life of an expat in Qatar.

On the last day of May, which was yesterday, under the sweltering 45 degrees, Red Apples Events and Media House, who was also behind the Holi ‘Rang Barse!’ event in March, decided to drench and sway the city dwellers with water sprinklers, sprayers and foam tubs as popular DJs like Akbar Sami play away chartbusters till wee hours of the night. They called it, Pani da Rang’, an event heavily inspired by the Songkran festival of Thailand. And as expected, some of us flocked to the Sealine Beach Resorts, the venue of the event, simply to get wet in the middle of the desert, under the blazing sun.

The event which was scheduled to start at 3, eventually started at 6 pm, not very uncommon in this part of the world, and since majority of us were Indians, the brand ambassadors of tardiness, very few of us were seen complaining. The event started with a solo gig by one of the performers and it did very little warming up; with unusual choices for songs, he failed to feel the pulse of the audience and soon enough made way for the next. So the DJ-ing eventually started and we finally found ourselves exchanging some reassuring glances as we moved to the Bollywood chart-boilers. The water sprinklers, planted conveniently to accommodate as many people under and around it, brought in the much awaited chill and thrill along. As the numbers got groovier, the moves got brazen, and the stomping and the dancing left some pools of water and mud in the sand, and I prayed hard against an adventurous bloke turning it into a mud fight or something of the sort. To be honest, I was most suspicious of my very own husband!  Thankfully, things did not get wild and most of us stuck to the water pistols and mugs and other seemingly likely containers to hold water to splash at each other. But from time to time the tempo of the beats would fall and people would invariably be heard discussing how wonderful the Holi event was! For the ones like me, who missed out on that one, had nothing much to complain about. However, in between came a band of boys, with a mouth percussionist as the highlight, but since the sea was close and with temperatures slightly dropping, one hardly had the patience to do anything but keep dancing to keep warm. When it things got rather boring from time to time, we would hog on the kababs, the shwarmas and the fritters that had to be bought from the near-by stalls and drag from  a  sheesha and sip tea to keep the spirits alive.

And after much wait, came DJ Sami. I must have been a part of many of his DJ-ing stints during my college, back in Delhi; he’s known to keep his fans' excitement levels soaring and reaching a crescendo. Here, however, he did not quite take the crowd by storm, but fueled the momentum in a crowd that was losing interest. Refreshed, after the tea and the snack, we joined the crowd one more time and it did not surprise me at all to see how easily we broke into the hook steps from the popular Bollywood numbers. We Indians love our hind cinema, don’t we? In a matter of some time, the songs got catchy and some of the latest numbers added that zing which was till now missing. In between, the adventurous streaked husband, made a few splashes into the sea as well, and I followed suit, complimenting his mad spirit. And by now the crowd had gotten madder and bolder than before. For once, it was reassuring to see that men in all shapes, sizes and of every age groups behaving so well, that too more so in a rain dance. I would have never considered going for a rain party back in India since one can expect anything but well behaving uninebriated men in a party like this. The problem is not alcohol, but the undue liberties men take in their inebriated state and conveniently blame it to the alcohol. Take this same bunch of men and drop them in a party scene in India and we all know how little it would take to turn them into monsters. But since alcohol is not consumed in public places as a rule in the country, (except for a selected places) and the most unthinkable of penalties for harassing a woman, one would think twice since it would take much more than just blaming it to the alcohol. So without having to worry about what we womankind are so given to worrying, we danced away till late in the evening and before the crowd could break and a sea of vehicles jammed the roads, we quietly left the scene and savored the good time we had.