Dance Lessons When I was about seven, my mother suggested dance lessons. I was at the age when I had newly discovered the charm of Hindi movies and of the lilting songs that would come over the radio on Vividh Bharati . We did not have television then in India and from the handful of movies that I had been taken to, I recalled the scenes that had accompanied some of these songs and tried clumsily to reproduce the dance movements. Naturally, to my untrained body, these did not come easily and my movements were blindly repetitive and I would twirl around until my head spun and I fell down dazed. Enthused by my budding interest in music and dance, my parents took me to a series of Indian classical dance recitals that further fired my imagination. We watched dancers perform the traditional Indian dance forms – Bharata Natyam, Kathak, Odissi, Kathakali and so on. I almost bounced in my seat with excitement and tried to commit the action sequences that I was watching to memory.