Raahgirs skip, hop & work out to B-wood songs in Delhi

A busy work week, a long night of partying or even the heat can’t keep Delhi away from Raahgiri.
This Sunday, Raahgiri began with a session on laughter yoga conducted by the NGO Apna Parivar and the fun continued with fitness sessions, a flash mob and a street play. A Square Dance Company got Raahgirs to work out by making them dance to popular songs from Bollywood.Appoorv Agarwal, artistic director, A Square Dance Company, said, “Our routine is called QBA (qualitative/quantit-ative body attribution) and it is a combination of aerobics, folk dance and Bollywood freestyle. Each dance form is done for seven-ten minutes. We enjoyed our Raahgiri session and were surprised to see such a big crowd early in the morning.”
Devils Circuit’s running boot camp also saw a large crowd trying out different exercises. Adnan Adeeb, founder of the group, said that the large turnout of people surprised him and he was glad that so many people were willing to give it a try. He added, “It was good to see such a diverse crowd where kids as young as nine and even 65-year-old people were following our routine. Today, we kept the routine simple and less strenuous because we didn’t know exactly how much these people could do.”
NDMC had staged a play last week that drew attention to their plan of a cleanliness drive. This week too they staged another play. Dr PK Sharma, director and municipality head officer, NDMC, told us that their drive was going well. He said, “Our initiative is going fine and this week we have another street play. We have also reached out to schools and asked students to go on sanitation rallies around the city.” Shabnam Kundra, officer on special duty, NDMC also spoke to us about the initiative and added, “We are conducting a drive for three weeks. Our way of dealing with people who litter is inspired by Gandhigiri, so we gave them a rose as a request to not litter. People can also take pictures of those who litter and upload them on the NDMC website.”
Students from DCAC were present to collect donations for flood victims in Jammu and Kashmir. Tushar Singhal, a volunteer, told us, “We have had a very good response from people here and have managed to collect a good amount for the cause.” Students from Kulachi Hansraj Modern School, who came with a few teachers, sang We Shall Overcome to commemorate International Day of Peace, which was on Sunday. A group of artists from World Comics India focused on the issue of stereotyping of the northeastern people and used posters that they had made to bring attention to the cause. Niharika, a member of the group, said, “Our medium is the message and we are using our comics to spread the message of how people from the northeast get stereotyped. “
Farhana.Numan@timesgroup.com