After a full day's work at the Diversity Best Practices Global Symposium we left Cisco in a big bus to go to the Taj Hotel, where our friends from Sodexo hosted a dinner party for speakers, sponsors and important guests.

The Taj is a magnificent, brand new hotel that rivals the hippest hotels I've seen in California or New York. The lobby is red and beige with the most amazing couches and white linen lamps that look like graceful cocoons. The room for our dinner was enormously tall, with soft gold walls and a lush carpet worthy of India.

We wanted to share a cultural experience with our guests so we hired a troupe to perform the Dandee, a dance done with sticks that tells a story of Krishna. They also wanted to teach the dance to us, which seemed like a delightful idea.

There were six performers, three men and three women wearing purple, yellow and red costumes. They click clacked with their sticks and circled in fours and in pairs. The steps were rather complex, but the movement was at a pace that seemed manageable.

The dancers performed several beautiful dances and then approached the audience and asked us to join them.

I love to dance, and apparently so did many people in the room because in short order the dance area was full. There were women in saris, evening dresses, and suits-- all click clacking out a beat to the music and following the steps of the dancers. Ganesh and a few other brave men joined us as well. Sigrid Senamaud stood out in her German folk dress, which she wore as an expression of her heritage. 

The performers taught us a dance that felt a bit like a square dance mixed in with the stick banging. Then we danced in a circle that was reminiscent of the kind of dance every American wedding boils down to after a while. Cultures swirled together in my head, the beat began to feel very familiar and then I did some cross cultural risk taking:  I suddenly broke out into the Funky Funky Chicken dance. Deepika, our Indian friend from California joined me in this most elegant of dances and we began to teach our teachers some new fun steps. After the Funky Funky Chicken it was the Soupy Sails, the Jerk and the Freddy. The teachers were quick learners and soon everyone was dancing a combination of Indian and American dance, banging our sticks together for either one.

If I had planned it the Funky Funky Chicken might not have been the first American icon that I would have introduced to our new Indian friends. Perhaps I should have started with the Twist. Now that's a dance you could do in a sari!