Daijiworld Media Network - Mumbai
Mumbai, Jun 1: India's latest internet sensation is #DancingUncle. The video of a middle-aged man setting the stage on fire, with his chic dance moves is doing rounds on social media.
According to Hindustan Times, which did some research on tracking down this ‘Dancing Uncle’, the man in the video is Sanjeev Shrivastava, a professor in the electronics department at the Bhabha Engineering Research Institute, in Bhopal.
Shrivastava told HT in an interview that he has been dancing since 1982 with no formal training. The 42-year-old admits that he was inspired by his mother Mohini Devi Shrivastava who has been a classical dancer.
Though Shrivastava won Madhya Pradesh’s best dancer award three times in the eighties in competitions held in Bhopal, he could not make it big. However, the video of him dancing at his brother-in-law’s wedding in Gwalior on May 12 made him an overnight sensation. “I don’t know who shot the video, but I am really grateful to him. I never got such an appreciation before,” he says and adds that he has been showered with congratulatory messages and phone calls.
Shrivastava in the video clip is seen dancing to a song called ‘May se Meena se na Saaaqi se’ from the 1987 movie ‘Khudgarz’, starring actors Govinda and Neelam. The woman dancing coyly along with him is his wife Anjali.
Though he has danced hundreds of times and performed even at college functions, and theatre groups, Shrivastava says it never occurred to him to upload his own video.
Twitter user Gautam Trivedi’s post on Shrivastava’s Govinda dance got more than 5,000 retweets and it has been ‘liked’ by more than 10,000 people.
Senior journalist Barkha Dutt responded to fellow journalist Tina Sharma’s tweet of the video clip, calling it ‘SUPERB’.
One user also declared Shrivastava as the special winner of the #FitnessChallenge thrown by Minister of State Youth Affairs & Sports, Rajyavardhan Rathore.
In another video, Shrivastava is dancing to a remix of popular movie songs from the eighties. Shrivastava says that his two sons Parv (12) and Aradhya (10) have taken after him and are good at dance.
Here's the video: