The Disney stars on stage (top); young fans in the audience (above). Pictures by Rashbehari Das

You probably never imagined seeing Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse and Goofy dance to Dus bahane or Just chill in Calcutta. Neither did hundreds of kids and their parents who flocked to City Centre on Saturday afternoon for a glimpse of some Disney stars.

But in a short and energy-packed show, Mickey Mouse and Co. grooved to the Bollywood beats, spoke in their funny voices, shook hands and posed for photos, much to the delight of their wide-eyed fans, young and old.

The song-and-dance event was part of the Disney team?s six-city tour of India, with Calcutta the fourth stop after Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Delhi. Hyderabad and Bangalore are up next.

?The response has been overwhelming like this everywhere we?ve been,? said Tom Varzana, director of the show. ?In Calcutta, it started right from the airport when we touched down.?

Some grown-ups perhaps thought it was only a few people dressed up in fancy costumes, but for kids it was all about meeting their reel heroes in the real world.

For the 200-odd lucky ones who managed to get inside the special enclosure in front of the makeshift stage ? chosen through contests ? it was a magical experience. The comperes Rene and John ? from Disneyland Hong Kong ? managed to get the kids on their feet right from the start.

If two groups were pitted against each other to determine who could scream the loudest, they united to join in the jig to numbers like Feel the Magic, Hot Hot Hot and Jumpin? Jam.

?She absolutely loved it,? said Siddharth and Namrata Surana of their three-year-old daughter Anjali. ?Her only complaint was that the show was too short.?

Ditto for little Ananya Shetty, all of four years. ?She is not yet familiar with each of these characters, but she liked the show nevertheless,? offered dad Chandrashekhar Shetty, carrying her off the stage after a round of handshakes with Mickey, Minnie and Goofy.

Then there were the sad faces of those who couldn?t make it on to the stage. A flurry of requests greeted security personnel and almost anyone wearing a Disney T-shirt. ?We don?t have passes but we want to get inside,? was the constant buzz from those waiting in the wings.

?There may be other people simply putting on a Mickey or Donald costume elsewhere, but this is the real thing. And you?ll know the difference when you see it,? K. Seshasaye, spokesperson for Walt Disney Television International (India), had promised before the start of the show.

By the end of the City Centre show on Saturday, those present couldn?t have agreed more.

Subhajit Banerjee

A minority mission

Celebrities on their way through a country are routinely asked what they think of it. But rarely does one get a response like that from award-winning writer Xu Xi . Waiting her turn at the seminar organised by the American Literature Study Circle at the USIS on Thursday, she was exasperated by the endless honks of passing traffic. But, she said, it helped her understand the spiritual side of India, ?the tradition of meditation?, the need to shut oneself off. It also told her ?about the fluidity of time?.

It is like this only in Indonesia where everything happens, but at its own pace, she said. Shuttled from Delhi to Calcutta, participating in the Katha Story Festival and giving lectures at various universities, Xu Xi also found ?the use of English quite surprising?. Not only were some of the students and professors using words with ?the skill of poets?, but even a hotel attendant said a particular problem would soon be ?rectified?!

With six books of fiction to her name like The Unwalled City and The Daughters of Hui, Sussi Komala (her name after naturalising in the US) has an obsession with words and their different usage.

Cross-cultural experiences interest her. The Sino-American relationship and the ongoing cultural shift in Hong Kong appear in many of her works. So do women?s issues, the position of women in the time of globalisation, racial injustice, poverty and war.

Children dressed up in their best at a fancy dress competition at Shoppers’ Stop in the run-up to Republic Day. Picture by Pabitra Das

English was as foreign a language to this Hong Kong-born writer as Cantonese, ?because my parents spoke Javanese?, but Xu Xi had been writing in English from childhood. Her address at the Calcutta seminar to mark the birth anniversary of Martin Luther King was in itself a creative exercise. King for her became a portal to her personal experiences as part of the minority in America. She talked of her life in the ?safe world of academia, as a privileged foreign student of literature?, which didn?t prepare her to face the racial isolation outside.

Married to a white jazz musician she was still a ?pretend white? and just two per cent of the total census. But with time she became aware of her role as part of the minority (?only the minority can observe from a distance and comment?). She realised that ?you as an individual contribute to the diversity? which should be recognised ?as a value?.

All Xu Xi?s books were published in Hong Kong, but lately a lot of American characters are appearing beside her Hong Kong Chinese protagonists.

Living in the rural part of New York, Sussi Komala is ?more comfortable?. Perhaps she has, like the title of her soon to be published book, formed the ?Habit of a Foreign Sky?.