Flash Mob’s going viral
A very interesting concept, a gang of big unknown people getting together breaking into a furious dance and then disappearing, leaving everybody around with their jaws dropping.
I saw such a flash dance video on the program News Net on NDTV and it was based on the T-Mobile Advertisement at the Liverpool Street Station and it was sensational, the coordination, the music, the moves simply brilliant. I enjoyed the overall performance and watched the video more than just a couple of times. It was simply special.
One of the first flash mobs was created in Manhattan in May 2003, by Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper’s Magazine. The first attempt was unsuccessful after the targeted retail store was tipped off about the plan for people to gather. Wasik avoided such problems during the second flash mob, which occurred on June 3, 2003, at Macy’s department store, by sending participants to preliminary staging areas – in four prearranged Manhattan bars – where they received further instructions about the ultimate event and location just before the event began.
More than 130 people converged upon the ninth floor rug department of the store, gathering around an expensive rug. Anyone approached by a sales assistant was advised to say that the gatherers lived together in a warehouse on the outskirts of New York, that they were shopping for a “love rug”, and that they made all their purchase decisions as a group. Subsequently, 200 people flooded the lobby and mezzanine of the Hyatt hotel in synchronized applause for about 15 seconds, and a shoe boutique in SoHo was invaded by participants pretending to be tourists on a bus trip.
Wasik claimed that he created flash mobs as a social experiment designed to poke fun at hipsters and to highlight the cultural atmosphere of conformity and of wanting to be an insider or part of “the next big thing”. The Vancouver Sun wrote, “It may have backfired on him … [Wasik] may instead have ended up giving conformity a vehicle that allowed it to appear nonconforming.” In another interview he said “the mobs started as a kind of playful social experiment meant to encourage spontaneity and big gatherings to temporarily take over commercial and public areas simply to show that they could”.
Today I was bomarded with several messages and tweets when the Flash Mob pleasantly struck a busy Mumbai Railway station. Two hundred dancers took commuters at Mumbai’s hectic Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station by surprise on Sunday, when they broke into dance accompanied by the title track from Bollywood hit ‘Rang de Basanti’.
The Mumbai Flash Mob, as it was dubbed, threatened to become a viral phenomenon in India by Tuesday evening, as videos of the performance rocketed through the Twitter universe, were posted on Facebook and liked on YouTube.
While the video looks spontaneous, the act was carefully planned. But I will still rate the Grand Central Act way above this one.Getting over 200 people to participate in a choreographed dance in the middle of Mumbai’s bustling central railway station required a month of planning, including visits to three different departments at the station for security clearance. Atul Rane, senior divisional operations manager at Indian Railways, helped coordinate with other departments to organize the lighting, ladders and camera placements, Shonan Kothari said.
Then Shonan Kothari had to coordinate the dancers. “I had 325 people sign up within two days of sending out the e-mail,” she said. She didn’t spread the word on any social networking Web site, fearing too many people would show up.
The dancers were taught the choreography in small batches over the course of two weeks in a Malabar Hill park.While Mumbai did put up a good show, Delhi as usual made a thorough mess of things. Lack of permissions, too much media and too much crowd and slowly everything went haywire and turned into a complete flop.
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