When I was in the ninth stan­dard or so, I decided to try my hand (and feet) at clas­si­cal danc­ing. There was a dance teacher in school called Mrs Dhin­gra, who would take classes at her home. I bravely enrolled.

And thus began my one-year affair with the grace­ful clas­si­cal dance form called Bharat­natyam. Now, I did com­plete one year, but I can frankly say that I wasn’t her star pupil. All that head-shaking and hand fold­ing into del­i­cate grace­ful mudras were a chal­lenge for me, from the word go (or the words ta they they!).

I stum­bled and bum­bled through the year, but I am proud to say that at least I tried.

Any form of clas­si­cal or orga­nized danc­ing is some­thing I find very dif­fi­cult. My feet, seem to have a mind of their own. “I’ll lead, you just fol­low” said Lavan­nya the other day, at Shankar’s dance party, try­ing to get me to do a sim­ple rock and roll step. Sigh. She gave up when she dis­cov­ered that it wasn’t easy to lead me at all. Oth­ers too have tried and failed miserably.

My hands go some­where, my feet some­where else and my body doesn’t go at all.

At the beau­ti­ful and serene Nritya­gram prac­tice hall, I watch in won­der as these lovely dancers cre­ate magic in the air with their grace­ful move­ments, under the watch­ful eye of their guru. The prac­tice ses­sion in progress was Odissi and I watched spell­bound, as the women moved to the mel­liflu­ous voice of the singer.

There’s a cer­tain ethe­real qual­ity to Indian dance forms that hits you when you watch a per­former, weave mag­i­cal pat­terns in the air with her feet and hands. Her eyes move from one side to the other, her eye­brows twitch­ing as she shakes her head, con­vey­ing emo­tions that range from pain to joy.

My other attempt to get my body into rhythm was at a Shia­mak Davar class in Mum­bai a few years ago. I looked at all the lovely young lis­some bod­ies around and thought to myself, man, what do they eat? But that thought apart, I realised that size and age is no bar­rier to being able to move and con­tort your body into strange positions.

The ses­sions were near my office so it was quite con­ve­nient to just walk across for a hec­tic round of prac­tice. And I also dis­cov­ered not so young peo­ple also, only too will­ing to join in for a share of the fun. So there we were — a mot­ley group of young, no so young and bor­der­ing on get­ting old kind of folks — all shak­ing a leg to Like a Prayer. We later even per­formed the num­ber on stage, my first (and pos­si­bly last) dance per­for­mance on stage.

Which brings me to the kind of dance I can man­age to get by : what I call unor­ga­nized danc­ing. This you will see a glimpse of at par­ties or at a night club when you sim­ply ‘let go’. So even if your limbs and body is going in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, who cares? The point is that you’re hav­ing fun. And exer­cis­ing at the same time. Is there a bet­ter way of burn­ing calo­ries and hav­ing fun at the same time? Danc­ing comes clos­est to achiev­ing this pur­pose I’ve realized.

Last evening watch­ing a pro­gram called Jha­lak Dikhla Ja on Sony where they make a few of our stars dance, I real­ized that every­one has potential :)

Pooja Bedi (one of the stars in the show) pro­fessed that she has always had 2 left feet. She was so bad that Farah Khan made her dress dance instead in that famous song sequence from Jo Jita Wohi Sikan­dar (I think that was the movie) with Aamir Khan, where her red dress flies all over the place. But she went on to dance the salsa with her part­ner who has obvi­ously worked quite hard with her. And she seemed to enjoy it too.

*Bling* went the light in my head.

So who knows. There’s hope for me too. I’m going to go enroll myself in a dance school this week­end. In a few months, I might be able to do a hot salsa num­ber (with a hot man hope­fully?), who knows, ay? You can’t say I’m not optmistic!