By a lucky coincidence, I found myself in London right in time for this year’s London Mela festival at the Gunnersbury Park in Ealing. The festival was scheduled to start at noon, but the weather was so bad that we didn’t get there till 4pm. On the way to the park I kept worrying about all the goodness I was missing out on, but as we walked in I saw that just being there was fun, even if you don’t stand in front of a particular stage or inside a certain tent and watch what’s going on there. The festival grounds were much larger than I’d expected, and there were so many people!

Although the majority were Asians, their clothes varying from traditional to painfully stylish, you could see people of all races and colours, including a couple of middle-aged white ladies in saris and an “Om” tattoo on their shoulder blades. Despite having travelled quite a lot by now, I still find it strangely exciting to be in such a diverse and mixed crowd, as I come from a very different place. Slovenia is so small and out of the way that up to 10 or 15 years ago, the only foreigners living here came from other ex-Yugoslav countries, so they weren’t even proper foreigners. Then the first Chinese came, but even today you very rarely see any immigrants here. That’s why even London or Berlin have such a different feel for us, even though we share the same history and the cities themselves don’t look that different to Ljubljana, only much larger.

Anyway, let’s leave this brief digression and return to the Mela. We’d been to Southall earlier that day and as I heard Bollywood music playing in all the shops, I kept hoping people would suddenly start dancing in the streets. No one did, but at the Mela, you could actually see little groups of people dancing and singing. Most of the time it started with a group of performers doing a dance, and then the people standing around would just join in.

I bought a couple of DVDs and a rubber band with “Love Peace Om Shanti” on it (I’m not a Buddhist, but a message like that is pretty universal, I think), then we did a little tour of the grounds, marvelled at the speed and skill of the henna tattooists, admired all the beautiful saris and scarves on sale, tried to identify at least some of the food at the food stalls (I need an international cookbook or something!) and stopped in a tent to watch a girl dance/perform acrobatics on a rope while there was a brief spell of rain outside. Then we moved on, passing a fantastic giant paper tiger on our way.

I couldn’t stop thinking about “Tiger, tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night“ until we returned to the main stage just in time for Pascal of Bollywood and I was completely distracted by his fashion sense. Hot pink glittery shirt, combined with bright orange trousers? Seriously? Oy!

I can’t tell you much else about him as I didn’t know any of the songs he performed. Some other people did and sang along, but the crowd around the stage seemed to thin considerably while he was on. I was much more interested in seeing Atif Aslam, especially because I had no idea what to expect. I have to be honest and tell you that I’d never heard of him before until I saw his name in the Mela programme. After that I listened to Bheegi Yaadein (or is it called Woh Lamhe? Even the announcers were confused about that) and really liked it, but didn’t know any other songs of his. The rest of the audience more than made up for my ignorance though, they chanted his name and screamed when he came onstage. We moved closer to the stage and suddenly found ourselves in a crowd of dancing Asian boys, all singing and bouncing along with the music, and there was even a bit of crowd surfing. Woo! Atif was fantastic from the moment he came onstage looking a bit like Che Guevara to the last note of Bheegi Yaadein.

I’m completely converted into a fan now and already trying to find out where I can buy his CD! We were all just starting to shout for an encore when the announcer directed us to the little stage to our left where Bollywood Steps just began their performance, which was also the grand finale of the festival. So we quickly moved there and I can’t tell you what I enjoyed more, Atif or Bollywood Steps. They were both great! I didn’t dare hope the Steps would dance to any song I know, so I was pleasantly surprised when there was a neat choreography to Dhoom Machale (complete with men ripping off their shirts and sparks flying up in the background. Woo!) and completely beside myself when they continued with Kajra Re and finished with Dhadak Dhadak!

The songs were edited down to about 2 minutes each and the choreographies were different than in the movie, but I loved it all and sang and danced along in a rather embarrassing way. I have a videoclip of Dhoom Machale that I was going to upload to YouTube, but it’s too large and anyway, you can watch it in better quality, listen to all the performances and take a look at the photo gallery on the BBC website, thanks to the BBC Asian Network!