When a middle-aged Indian couple set the dance floor on fire at a recent wedding, they did not anticipate that they would soon become an internet sensation. But when a video of their performance started catching the attention of social media, it over the last few days, it soon raked in thousands of views and was widely shared on Twitter and Facebook.
A little more than 30-seconds long, the black-and-white clip shows the couple jiving to two songs on an almost-empty dance floor. Going by the numerous comments, the graceful abandon and the evident chemistry between the couple seemed to have struck a chord with the jaded internet generation.
The video was first uploaded by couple’s daughter, Gitana Singh, on November 24, as a testimony to her mother’s skills to dance in a sari. Singh had recently made her profile public to promote her chocolate-making venture, Cocoa Bark Series, and that is presumably how the video was noticed.
“There have been an unimaginable number of people calling from all over the world. It is very strange, I don’t know how or why it went viral,” said the woman in the video, a Delhi resident and a painter, who did not want to be identified in the media. “I’m not very familiar with all this.”
Her husband, a businessman, is trained in ballroom dancing. Though she has no formal training herself, she said that “when the man is a good lead it’s very easy to dance”.
She described the experience of going viral as “fun and embarrassing”, but something that she’d want to blow over soon.
Singh has frequently shared videos of her parents dancing, including a recent one of them jiving in front of a cheering crowd in Portugal and of her father dancing to Abba’s Dancing Queen with her. “In my opinion, when the music is good and you’re enjoying it then it’s stupid to let it go waste,” he said, explaining his motto.
This is not the first time than an Indian wedding has birthed a social media star. In June, the video of a middle-aged man showing off his moves on a Govinda number went viral, earning him the moniker of “dancing uncle”. The man was later identified as Sanjeev Srivastava, a professor at a Bhopal engineering college.
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