This Bengaluru man defuses COVID-19 tension among masses by dancing

After entrepreneur Riitesh Panndya’s father was diagnosed with Covid-19, he and his friends have created a song-dance in Tamte/Tapanguchi style to spread awareness about the infection among the masses
Riitesh Panndya
Riitesh Panndya

BENGALURU:  When his 64-year-old father tested positive for coronavirus last month, Riitesh Panndya, an entrepreneur dealing in customised apparels, ensured one thing – not to panic. After things settled down, Panndya felt that having experienced the situation first-hand, he should reach out to people on how to handle a similar situation.

But wanting to reach out to masses, he, along with his friend Sreekar KV, decided to do a song-dance in Tamte/Tapanguchi style to impress upon locals the importance of staying home and safe. “It’s an honest attempt to create awareness about the dos and don’ts in a wacky way,” he says about the video, which saw the coming together of 12 friends. Panndya runs a group called Normal is Boring, a fun Facebook group with 22,000 members who share life experiences in a humorous way.   

After Sreekar wrote the lyrics, the duo connected with other friends from the social media group, asking them to sing and record their performances from homes, which were then put together and edited. “We told our friends how we wanted them to go about this, and it was pretty straightforward. For instance, with all the news about the lack of beds in hospitals, I did one sequence where I hold a bunch of notes and sing that even if you have all the money in the world, there are no beds available.

While it may be done in a humorous manner, there’s a serious message we are trying to put across,” he says, adding that his family took a conscious decision of not getting his father admitted to hospital, instead keeping him at home to recover. “But we also were on the guard, knowing that any minute he might need to be hospitalised. Luckily, that situation never came to be,” he says. 

His father, who runs a wholesale garlic store in Yeswanthpur, had been working through the lockdown, and probably contracted the infection during work hours. “We swung into action soon after he displayed symptoms– fever, body ache and loss of taste. As the tests were in progress, my wife and two daughters shifted to my in-laws’ place. I stayed home with dad,” says Panndya, who later tested negative for the virus.    

So far, the video, which is almost 90 seconds long, has received 2 lakh views. “The reason we were keen to do it in Kannada and use a local style is because we wanted to reach out to more people across Karnataka. After my father was diagnosed with Covid-19, I did the first video in English, which I realised had a different and limited reach,” he says. 

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