Show for the fan club

JUST WHAT the doctor prescribed this summer. Fans, to keep your cool. And Usha Fans, sure had more than a clue to beat the heat when it organised a get-together for its dealers on Sunday evening.

`Jodi No.1' as the programme was called, wasn't exactly an entertainer in the David Dhawan mould. Instead, it was a punchy cocktail of business and entertainment, a tasteful but a snappy buffet of fads over the years, as `gaajar ka halwa' flirted with ice-cream in plates across the hall at Taj Coromandel.

The organisers quite cleverly mixed ingredients of work and play, for their dealers and select invitees, as they sparked off the evening with Chennai's own Miss India (Asia Pacific) Maheshwari playing hostess/compere.

The breezy evening fanned up further when models shook a leg on the ramp in salwars-suits soon after the hostess got done narrating the history of the company in the sixties calling it the era of MGR, `Sivaji' Ganesan and Usha for the first sequence of the fashion show.

The seventies and the eighties, we were told, was the era of Rajini and Kamal and of course, Usha fans. The sequence featuring `hippy culture' in spite of the cliched `Dum Maro Dum' did throw up a few interesting and original outfits. Next, was the ``era of Rahman, the nineties when Rajni and Kamal continued to keep their position afloat, like Usha did,'' as models walked down the ramp with some mind-blowing light breezy cottons, tailor-made for the Chennai summer. Now, if only they were `wearable'.

The script for the evening then proclaimed Madhavan and Jyotika as the ``superstars of the 21st century'', and how Usha fans had withstood the winds of change.

Interesting analogies, but none of the clothes or the music throughout the sequences had any direct link to the names dropped: MGR, Sivaji, Rajni, Kamal, Madhavan and Jyotika. Rahman being the only exception, as models shook a leg to `Shaka Laka Baby' for the era of Madhavan and Jyotika.

But who was complaining? The fan dealers chilled out.

By Sudhish Kamath

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