Punjabi Dancing Goes Competitive in the U.S.

This is great: NPR does a feature on competitive Bhangra. Bhangra is a form of dance and music originally from the Punjab region of the subcontinent. (The region was bisected during partition. Here's a link to Wikipedia's entry about the Punjab Province of Pakistan.) Anyway, it's gaining popularity among students of all backgrounds in the United States. It seems that my once and future university even has a team.

It just so happens that this week is Punjab Week in Kindergarten, soon to be followed by NWFP Week, Sindh Week, and Balochistan Week. The kids are having a good time doing math with pictures of Punjabi produce, coloring maps that detail Punjab's five rivers (perhaps the blog title is now clear*), writing Panjabi words in our class multilingual dictionary**, and doing Freeze Dance and Musical Chairs to Bhangra music. They love Bhangra by the way. For the first several weeks of school I noticed that their favorite form of goofing around was to burst into a particular form of dance in which they would sort of hop from one foot to the other and point their index fingers in the air. Turns out they were doing Bhangra (or a stereotyped version of it). Anyway, Little Sweetie especially dug the youtube videos of Bhangra competitions I showed them. Check it out, yaar.

*Finally got around to finding out what the rivers are called: the Ravi, Chenab, Jhelum, Sutlaj, and Sindh (also called the Byas). They flow into the Indus, which qualifies as a sixth river that flows within the borders of Punjab, but we're not going to go changing the name now, are we? Anyway "panch" is the word for "five" and "aab" means "water," So there you go.

**My kids are so cool. Every one of them speaks two languages well, and at least some of a third. They've all got Urdu down and have pretty well nailed English (at an age-appropriate level), and Littles Sweetie and Pumpkin speak some Panjabi at home while Little Darlin' speaks Pashto. Our dictionary incorporates all of these languages as well as Spanish, which I speak fluently. Every time I bring in a Spanish word Little Darlin' starts counting to 10 in Spanish, "like Dora [the Explorer]!"