Wedding sangeet song list

With weddings popping up left, right, centre and diagonal and with me not being able to attend many, I thought I’d put together a list of appropriate songs for a filmy stellar Indian wedding sangeet and contribute to the celebrations remotely.

Don’t expect too many item songs or any songs with nonsensical lyrics. A wedding sangeet is in effect a way of expressing your emotions of love, gratitude, happiness, joy and good wishes by way of song and dance to and for the bride and the groom. Just lose all your inhibitions to join in the spirit. Thus, it is only appropriate that the theme of the sangeet is ‘wedding’ and not anything else.

Remember, you could shuffle the songs across the different dancer-categories and some could be just for the couple or solo performances.

Key:

Punters - Couple's male friends and male family members

Girlies - Couple's female friends and female family members

Here is a living breathing list of wedding songs that I regularly update. Please comment with any more additions you would like to add. Do let me know if you can't find any of the songs below.

Punters and girlies

Tumhi ho bandhu

Radha teri chunari

Dama dum mast kalandar (remix version may be)

Rang rang mere rang rang main

Khud ko kya samajhti hain

Twist (from Love Aaj Kal)

Marjani (from Biloo Barber)

Jhoom barabar (title song)

Bumbro

Uff teri ada

Desi girl

Ainvayi ainvayi

Bole chudiyan

Jootey do paisay lo

Chumma chumma dey dey (ahem ahem…)

Shubh arambh

Disco deewane aha…aha…(from Student Of The Year)

Ghaghra

Daflee waaley daflee bajaa

Ladey nain to munday tera chain gaya (from Zor, love the song)

Dhoom tana

Hawa hawa aye hawa khushbu luta dey

O sanam (by Lucky Ali)

Chaiya chaiya

Dholi taro dhol bajey

Teri ooor

Aji din chadaya

Naam ada likna (from Yahaan)

Aankhen khuli ho ya ho bandh (from Mohabatein)

Tu yaar tu hi dildaar tu hi mera pyaar – Tera jogi (from Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani)

Chura liya hain tumne jo dil ko

Mera dil dil mera(from Salaam-e-Ishq)

Chunari chunari (from Biwi no. 1)

Yeh ladka hai allah (from Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham)

Suraj hua madham

Bahara (all versions)

Ishq Sufiyana (from the Dirty Picture)

Inha lamhon key damaan main (from Jodha Akbar)

Tujhme rab dikhta hain

Balam pichkari

Ruk jaa o dil deewaney

Groom and his punters

Batameez dil

Mauja hi mauja

Mere yaar ki shaadi hain

Kaali teri choti hain paranda tera laalni

Yeh chand sa roshan chehra

Dil dance maarey

Dil haara (from Tashan as a starting song of how the groom was so depressed before he met the bride)

Gori naal ishq meetha

Subah honey na de

Tenu leke main jawangaa

Main nikala gaddi leke

Dilwale dulhaniya le jayengey

Mehendi laga key rakhna

Hum tujhko utha kar ley jayengay, doli main bitha kar le jayengay

Talli hua talli hua yara dekho yara mera talli hua (avoid if possible)

Boothne ky tenu ghodi kinay chadaya (same as above)

Ranjhana (groom’s entry song)

Main rang sharbato kaa tu meethay ghaat ka paani

Bhai Bhai, bhaley more rama bhaley torey rama (from Ram Leela)

Dilliwaali girlfriend

Munda Punjabi dil lay gayi kudi Gujarat ki

Badan pay sitaary lapeytey huay

Channa vay ghar aja vay

Bachna aye haseeno (old or new)

Yeh tune kya kiya

Pee loon

Bride and her girlies

Lathey dee chadar

Mukhada piya kaa

Kala sha kala mera kala hain sardar

Ambsariya

Genda Phool

Nagada sang dhol bajey

Maar udari ne kugeeyaay maar udari (from Pinjar)

Chalka chalka (from Saathiya)

Mehendi hain rachnay waalee (from Zubeida)

Morni baga main bole

Maiyan Yashoda yeh tera kanhaiya (from Hum Saath Saath Hain)

Dholna (by Shubha Mudgal)

Jhalla (from Ishaqzaade)

O re piya (from Aja Nachle)

Dhunki dhunki dhunki lagey

Mai nee mai mundayr pay teri

Aja nachle (title song)

Nimbooda

Taarey hain bararatee chandni hain yeh baraat (Merlin’s beard, how did I miss this out, but use only the start till just before the slow part starts, that gets a bit of a drag, you could have the start twice on loop)

Maiya yashoda mori ghagri say Jamuna key tat par makhan chura ley gaya (from Jhootha hi sahi)

Yeh rishta kya kehlata hain (from Meenaxi)

Yeh Ladka haye alaah kaisa hain deewana

Deewana hain dekho

Radha kaisey na jaley

Dola re (from Devdas)

Paalkhi main hokey sawaar chali main

Kesariya hain roop maro

Brothers and sisters

Navrahi majhi

Mere brohter ki dulhan

Chotey chotey bhaiyon key bade bhaiyan

Lo chali main apney devar ki baraat leke

Waha waha Ram ji

Aunties, uncles from both sides

Key nachey muday di…Key nachey kudi da…

Yaha dulha hain baraati hain feeling hot hot hot (from Bride and Prejudice)

Rock and Roll Soniye (from Kabhi Alvida na Kehna)

Gore gore gore gore (from Main Hoo Na)

Auntyji auntyji get up and dance

Ambsariya

Kawa kawa kawa & Aja nachle nee aja nachle (from Monsoon Wedding)

Hai Jama lo (Sindhi song)

Jai jai Shiv Shankar

Jaha teri yeh nazar hain

Chod do aanchal zamana kya kahega

Mehboob mere (from Biwi No. 1)

Say Shava Shava

Tumsay milkay dil ka hain jo haal kya kare hey hey ho gaya hain kaisa yeh kamal kya kahey

London Thumakda

Lo aa gayi Lodhi vay

Laaraa lappa laraa lappa lahee rakh daa

Elojee sanam hum aa gayein 

Toddlers, nephews and nieces

It’s the time to disco

Too tooh (for kids only)

Chingam chabake (same as above)

Where’s the party tonight?

I hate luv Storyz (title song)

Chakde Chakde Chakde sarey gham

You are my Sonia

Koi kahey kehta rahe

Prem ki naiyeaa hain ram key bharosay apni bhi naya Ko paar tu lagayee de

Ensemble

(can include family, friends, uncles, aunties, toddlers – everyone depending for appropriate parts in the song)

Mahi ve (Love this one…)

Salaam-e-ishq ishq ishq, salaam-e-ish

Om Shanti Om (title track)

Mujhse dosti karogey parody

Hum Saath Saath Hain (title song)

Hum Saath Saath Hain parody

Happy dancing. Remember "Sing as if no one's listening and dance as if no one's watching."

Garba and how it should be played!

It took me three years and a new country to discover how Garba is really played. A quick ywhacky illustration to show what I mean.

VeganMoFo Recipe #2 : Rice flake salad

One of India's most loved street food items is Bhel! If you look closely at a menu of Indian street food, you will find it is anything but junk food! It consists of lots of healthy snacks and salads that one can enjoy for a few rupees.

One of my favourites is this Indian salad made with rice flakes.

The main salad consists of:

Chopped tomatoes

Chopped onions

Chopped cucumbers

Boiled and diced potatoes

Rice flakes (mum-raa)

Salted peanuts

Sprouted lentils

Boiled black peas

There are four main salad dressings you need:

1. Sweet red chutney made from tamarinds, dates and jaggery

- Boil some deseeded tamarinds and dates

- Make a paste using a food processor

- Sieve this paste into a bowl

- Add jaggery to the bowl and mix till it dissolves 

- Add cumin powder, red chilli powder, little turmeric and salt

2. Spicy green chutney made from mint, coriander and green chillies

- Wash a bouquet of coriander and mint thoroughly

- Remove the main stalks and discard them

- Chop off the leaves

- Put them in a mixer with chopped green chillies, salt, lemon juice and some pieces of ginger

- Add a little water and make a paste in the mixer

3. Garlic chutney made from garlic, red chillies and sesame seeds

- Take a mortar and a pestle

- Put cloves of garlic, red chilli powder, dollop of oil and a handful of sesame seeds in the mortar

- Use the pestle to crush and mix all the ingredients to make a thick paste

- Take small portions of the paste and mix with water to create a sauce and use as and when you are making the salad

You could make all the chutney's in the mortar and pestle for a more refreshing taste but this can be time consuming. Alternatively you can also make the garlic chutney by mixing all the ingredients in the mixer.

4. Lemon juice

- Take a lemon, wash it and roll it on a flat surface, apply pressure as you do this

- Chop it into half

- Deseed it carefully

- Squeeze it and collect the juice in a small glass bowl

For garnishing:

Finely chopped coriander

Bombay mix (available in packets at most Indian food stores)

Sev (available in packets at most Indian food stores)

- If not available in the market, make a dough of gram flour, salt, oil, red chilli powder and turmeric

- Get a sev-making machine which could resemble a noodle/ spaghetti making machine and use it to produce thin fine noodles and fry them in vegetable oil

- Strain all the oil and place them on tissue papers

- Crush them and use for garnishing

You can also make a dry salad by mixing a pinch of the following instead of the chutneys above. Squeeze in a lemon to your dry salad and top it with sev and chopped coriander.

Dry salad powders:

Chaat masala (or Jalani Jal Jeera)

Indian olive powder (amchur)

Black salt

Take a big bowl and toss all the ingredients and dressings in it as per your taste. I always try different combinations and rarely do I have the same-tasting bhel on my plate! That's the best part of this beautiful snack and makes 'cooking' it all the more fun!

Voila, your healthy Indian rice flake salad is ready to tingle your tastebuds! And yes, it's vegan!

WTM 2012 Powerhouse Economies - India

Indian Compass was invited to sit on the Powerhouse economies panel at World Travel Market 2012 by the European Tour Operators Association. Industry experts from the developing world joined hands to talk to the tourism industry at large. They shared secrets and top tips about the outbound travelers from their respective countries - India, Russia, Brazil, China and South Africa

In this video Stepehn Sackur of BBC World News interviews Ashwini Kakkar (Mercury Travels), Peter Nash (Tourism Ireland) and Indian Compass on Indian outbound travel.

To watch more videos click here.

Change the way they live by changing the way you celebrate

Dear Indian,

It is that time of the year again. Diwali will soon befall upon us. Doesn't sound very festive, does it? Well, my lack of interest sprouts from the contemporary methods of celebrating this festival of lights. In recent years it has turned into a festival of smoke. The manner in which we celebrate it puts me off from anything related to it. Almost. Every year the closer the calendar inches towards it, the fainter my heart grows.

Firstly, let me tell you that this article is addressed to a specific set of people. It is aimed at that 30% of India’s population who live in her cities; those who have been exposed to modern city-life and who, I would assume, are sensible enough to understand the difference between a ‘cow’ and a ‘car’. If you think you do, read on.

It is then addressed to 80% of those 30% living in urban India who are literate; which would be those Indians who know what ‘pollution’, ‘traffic’, ‘child labour’, ‘faith’ and ‘religion’ mean. They can probably also operate a computer. You should stop reading further if you think 'Google' and 'Internet' are the same thing!

Narrowing down further, it is for those 34 million of that 80% who are literate and live in urban India, who are active internet users, who blog, use social networks, share ideas and (may be) are budding entrepreneurs. You are probably one of them if your are reading this.

And lastly, it is addressed to all those who have made it through the above screeners and who burst fire crackers!

If you are a firecracker-burster, this article is addressed to you. With utmost sincerity and respect, all I request you to do is - Quit crackers! Celebrate a cracker free Diwali.

For those of you who never burst crackers or have already quit, and are still reading this request letter - Thank you, really! Please spread the message and get more Indians to join the cracker-free bandwagon.

It is beyond my understanding why someone who lives in a city, is well educated and can operate the computer would find the need to light up hazardous, life-threatening, menacing objects (read: firecrackers) to prove their allegiance to a God or celebrate the return of a king from exile. Firecrackers didn't even originate in India (it was China), so their association with a magical festival of lanterns and rangolis is bizarre!

Besides, our insatiable, unjustifiable, suicidal want for firecrackers has made India the second largest producer of firecrackers in the world. Shocking, isn't it? It’s outright shameful to be second on the black list of countries producing civil bombs, in broad daylight, all year round by employing two lakh child labourers in near-death-inducing environments. And what’s worst, almost 100% of those fireworks are consumed within India.

Let's put this into perspective. We have this mad urge to burst crackers, we have a mad industry supplying them to us and in the bargain we have cultivated a mad demand and supply chain where we do everything possible that defies common sense.

We harm our health and environment, smog our metropolitan cities, strip our atmosphere of fresh air, tear our ear drums, cause a rise in respiratory disorders (short-term) and cancer patients (long-term) on our hospital beds, spend a fortune in buying fireworks, put our children at risk of getting struck by stray flaming rockets, petrify our beloved pets, force the less privileged of our society to work under inhumane conditions and oddly enough, yet manage to celebrate our most auspicious religious festival. An auspicious festival of that same religion which preaches non-violence, equal rights and environmental sustainabiltiy.  No wonder we are known as the country of nutters world-over! Talk about double standards.

To all those who believe fireworks build a sense of bonhomie, bring cheer and foster community spirit...Ahem, ahem! Please go back to school and learn what these words mean. Get in touch with me thereafter. I will give you a million alternative things to do which will bring all the cheer and spirit back in your life! Duffer!

I cannot convey this message in a simpler way. Please quit crackers, if you haven’t. Spread the word and get others to join you. Write a letter to the building society you live in and put up posters about why everyone in the colony must quit crackers. Also offer alternative ways to celebrate the spirit of Diwali. Run speaker sessions in local schools and sensitize as many people as you can. Get the local governments to organize a community fireworks celebration (one pyrotechnic rocket is better than hundred). In the long run, organize meetings with the shops in your locality who sell firecrackers and offer them alternative business ideas to make the most from the increased level of festive consumer spending. Speak to your friends and family. And all the children you know. Request them to take the cracker-free route. Address the issue as soon as you see it happening. And make this a conversation starter, 'Will you burst fireworks this Diwali?'

Where do these crackers come from? How can we offer alternative jobs to those who will be unemployed if factories where they are made are shut down.? The driving force is a life of desperation, the desperation to earn a living. The owners of these factories engage in cracker-making as it is (sadly) a lucrative businesses, it brings in the cash. It is lucrative because we consumers make it so. We give them our cash. We need to offer them another lucrative business idea to manage and work in - Sivakasi itself has a big BPO/IT and printing industry. Why not train the workforce to enlarge those industries? Why is a UK, USA or Australia not in the top three fire cracker producing nations? Because they have an aorta of sense and they take up ethical welfare oriented business. (Okay, may be not, but you understand the sentiment here don't you? We need to shut down the fireworks industry and replace it with another one. If not the least we can do is to ensure utmost health and safety of those working in those environments.)

If you are still not convinced, go to any search engine's news section and type 'fire crackers'. Every news story that pops up will give you real-life stories of affected communities, burnt factories, high pollution levels, suffering asthmatics and all things negative. 

Although I must admit, there is awareness and there are numerous Indians who have taken the steps to reduce fireworks and who are doing their bit to make Diwali a cracker-free festival. But I also do feel, there is much more to be done. Every time I hear the sound of a 'bomb' or a rocket zooming in the night sky I tell myself, 'We haven't done enough. There is lots more to do'.

Hopefully, someday the rippling effects of our actions will reach the life-snuffing-factories of Sivakasi and other Indian firework-torture-camps. When the demand will stop, the supply shall too. Surely no employee loves working in a poison-chamber and no employer loves putting the lives of hundreds of families and workers on the brink of danger every day. They do it only because they don't have alternative sources of income.  

I urge you to put your creative minds together and to give them a chance to change the way they live by the changing the way we celebrate. Let’s not think cash and let’s think conscious. Let’s be the kind of people who live in cities, go to school, surf the internet and are sensible and wise enough to quit crackers. Please.

Chuckles,
Yashraj
Crack-er-quitter

ProloBLOGue

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The Millennium Wheel is a world renowned merry-go-round presenting to you a leisurely glimpse of one of World’s greatest cities, London, from cloud nine!  More commonly called as the LONDON EYE, it lets you soak in the length and breadth of the city, but what you make of London from that view is solely based on your own viewpoint and perspective. This blog will show you that very same city, inch-by-inch, as we rise in this ascent, but what’s going to be different is that this London will be a different London, a more magical London, it will be the LONDONThruMyEYE!

Almost a year ago in September 2009, I applied to the University of Westminster hoping to come to London for one life-changing year. All the forms, applications, statements of purpose, letters of support, recommendations, transcripts, deferment of admission, scholarship applications, change of course and one whole year later I finally reached where I had intended to be – The City of London!

{For those wanting to know a detailed account on ‘A Classic Guide to Apply for a University Abroad’, mail me}

As the days of departure came closer, the hustle and bustle of getting everything in place did not really permit me any time to digest the fact that within a few weeks I would have to cope up with the absence of all those things that I was so obsessed with, and that list of things is a really long one! A joke by an Idiot(Yes, Dedhia^Ref.1 that is you) ended up activating my Caller Tunes to some god-forsaken Hindi film song, which I then changed to a befitting ‘I’m leaving on a Jet Plane’ by John Denver, and this was the only way by which I could truly express what I had felt then.

During the packing, V.I.S.A.^Ref.2,  incessant shopping, V.I.S.A., meeting full family, V.I.S.A., meeting every friend and did I mention V.I.S.A., I knew it at the back of my mind that with every smiling-hugging good-bye came the after-bye which always left my eyes moist. But I kept reminding myself that it was just going to be for a year. Time flies and we all know that and the more I thought about cutting off, the more it would bother me. The answer was simple; it wasn’t really a big deal. The deal is as big as we make it out to be. Of course I was feeling all aww-ish about leaving but that was something I knew from the day I had applied for the course. I knew that going away was a part and parcel of the decision, and that slowly but subconsciously I had prepared myself to deal with it. The BBM-FB-Internet-Era has also made connecting with everyone so much easier, and that reassured me that I won’t be that Mumbai-sick very soon.

{For those wanting to know a detailed account on ‘Pre-Departure Preparations’, mail me}

A deep of sense of gratitude radiates from the depth of my being to everyone who called, messaged, emailed, met-up and wall-scrapped to send in all there good wishes all through the last week.

For friends, this blog will help us keep in touch and will give you an exhaustive account of my stay here in London.  For prospective Londoners, it will be a guide to everything you wanted to know about this city and for the rest it will be just another forgettable Blog!

Blah-Dee-Dahl,

Yauschrahj!

Ref.1 - Dedhia, short for Pranav Dedhia, brother from a different mother, dear friend and Idiot!

Ref.2 – V.I.S.A., abbreviation for Visitor Intention to Stay Abroad! (Surprised to know that it has a full form? =P)