Tap your right foot.
Now your left. Right again. Left. Right. Left. Left. Left.
Right.
But I seemed to have
only left feet. My first dance class was a lesson in coming out of my shell. My
dance teacher was an unbelievably patient woman. But she had no idea how unbelievably
shy I was. She started with the simplest steps. Easy footwork. Easier than
march past, I would wager. And yet, every step seemed heavier than the last. A
week went by and a month. I had started staying back after the regular dance
class to wait for mom who would pick me up. Meanwhile, my dance teacher would
tell me stories. Mythological tales, stories related to the dances we
performed, and any other stories she may have told her kids when they were my
age. That was the part I loved the most. I would later develop a mad obsession
for stories and books. But right then, I liked to listen to her and think and
imagine. Soon, she had started telling me a story related to every dance. You
see, every dance we performed had some significance. They were mostly Krishna
Radha tales or Meera Bai songs or old fables and the like. Once I had been
inducted into the story, the song seemed to come naturally to me. Suddenly I
was not so conscious of myself anymore. Much to my surprise, I discovered that
I had lost sense of my body and knew not and cared not how I looked while I
moved. I moved the way the song beckoned. My dear dance teacher had finally
made a little dancer of me.
So, when she went away
to settle in another city, I was sorely heartbroken. I knew then that no other
teacher could ever teach me the way she did. No one would tell me stories or
painstakingly position my arms to get the postures just right. I was on my own
now.
But I didn’t want to give
up on it just yet. While in secondary school, I joined another class. While making
my way through the swampy waters of class X and XII, I left dance again. Then I
got myself enrolled in engineering. And almost immediately after, got back to
dance. After my regular college classes, I would attend the dance class for an
hour and a half and then head home. The arrangement drained me of energy but
enthused me with a mad passion. I achieved Visharad in Kathak dance form as I finished
my graduation in computer engineering. Pretty coordinated that.
Although my
introversion persists oxymoronically with my freewheeling dance fantasies, I
have discovered a latent desire for classical dance in me. Something about the elegance
of Indian classical dances enthralls me. I have never really gotten over my
dance teacher’s stories or her graceful moves. The desire to emulate her and
perform as gracefully and beautifully has remained and persisted.
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| Yes, that's me. |
The architecture of
ancient buildings and the murals and paintings on old monuments make me wonder
about the movements of the yesteryears. I am literally gravitated to the past.
I feel the need to discover the most ancient dance forms of India. I wish to
capture them as precisely and fully as I can. I want to visit the various
gharaanas of Kathak, the temples of Bhartanatyam and the multifarious places in
India where the classical dance forms originated. I wish to see the various forms
in action. I want to bring to life the most antediluvian Indian dances possible
and collate them in my blog.
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| In profile |
“Dance, when you're
broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the
fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”
― Rumi
Dance represents a zeitgeist,
a revolution. Representing the spirit of the times, it takes one to an entirely
different era where every movement mirrors an ideology of the society. Dance is
expression and innovation combined. It is the largest and the most accurate mirror
of one’s culture. Dance is love and life in action.
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| truegritlit.blogspot.com |
As Voltaire said, “Let
us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the
world.”
