Doing Bharathanatyam can be boring sometimes. I mean when you are just practising dance steps mechanically, counting the beat but not feeling the music in your heart. When you are just keeping up with the steps and gestures, trying to remember everything by heart, and somehow it feels as if somebody else is dancing this but not you, you are more like a puppet at best. Shouldn't dancing be something natural and spontaneous, a form of art that is an expression of your personal feelings and impulses through the body, rather than a set of secret codes by means of hand gestures, which people who are not already in the know will probably not find time to decipher? Pardon me for saying this, but just for the sake of reflection, shouldn't a dancer simply be enjoying a dance like what you see in a movie? Take a look at that delightful dance scene of Aishwarya Rai in Guru, as she raises her arms towards the sky with joy, moving her hands freely about the wrists gracefully even with the rain splattering down, as she beats a rhythm against the pillars of a temple, or as she imitates the ducks waddling from side to side and the buffaloes moving with their horns. It's not much of a dance actually, so why does it fill one with joy watching a sequence like that? It's not just because it's Aishwarya Rai (anyway she has already gone the way of the Bachchan family now, end of story); the thing is that her movements convey a convincing sense of joy with the hellp of the music and the cinematography, so it feels as if the mountains and valleys are also coming alive with the swaying of her hips, and the audience understands immediately what it all means.

On the other hand, if it is say an annual Bharathanatyam dance show, what does it mean? Your friends coming to support just don't understand what the mudras are all about, your family is just hoping that you will look your glittery best and do them proud and have well-taken photos to prove later, while you are just struggling to execute the adavus and the mudras properly, praying that you won't forget any dance step and freeze on stage, and then hitting yourself in the head after making your blunder - it is a common occurrence, call it spontaneous memory failure or call it involuntary nervous system error. If nothing went seriously wrong, you can pat yourself on the back and then you have to quickly change, or quickly pack your makeup kit and costume jewellery and clear the dressing room and then go home trying not to think about the money you have spent tailoring the costume which you will now have to fold away to never see the light of day again for a long time. Everything is over in a flash, and you even begin to wonder how much of this chaotic affair and how much of the trouble you go through for it is purely about dance actually. Sometimes I also wonder how many girls are into dance more to please their parents than to please themselves, how many do it for activities points to get to a good college, how many just take up Bharathanatyam as a matter of course like they go to the temple and so on. It's probably a combination of different reasons. But I'm really wondering because if most girls pursue dance purely out of passion, why is it that an 'arangetram' here often means more like a farewell solo show before one gets married? Is it all a show to please other people then?

All right, I don't want to go into gender politics here so much. But I just had this half-crazy thought that perhaps the best people to preserve and promote the art of Bharathanatyam in the 21st century, taking over from the devadasis in the past, should be the male and gay dancers. For girls tend to dance for the sake of their parents before marriage and then stop dancing for the sake of their husbands after marriage. Male dancers, however, only dance for themeselves. OK, the reason that I'm mentioning the word gay here is more out of personal frustration actually. Sometimes I just feel Bharathanatyam is too decorative as a dance form. Generally speaking, you see too much of the lasya and too little of the tandava. So it can feel a bit against the nature of a male dancer; unless, of course if you're gay. I mean, if you watch the movies, male dancers are supposed to just shake their shoulders and thrust their elbows forward while stepping up with bent knees, that kind of thing. In fact, perhaps ideally I should also dance with a lungi, maybe even stop halfway and tie it up like they do in the song Vazha Meenu!

Now again I don't want to be misunderstood here. In no way am I suggesting that there is anything wrong with being gay. To me there is no big difference between a gay man and any human being in the basic fact that he, like anybody else, wants to love and be loved. You may think that gay men tend to be vain, but then straight men can also be vain in their own ways, maybe in their case they are flaunting their cars instead of their outfits, and maybe that's because they have money but no dress sense. And if a dancer happens to be gay, even if you think he is vain and narcissistic, as long as the personal touch he infuses into the dance is positive, what's wrong? And of course a gay man can also be the kindest soul around; a gay man may live a more fulfilled life than what most of us are capable of in our short lives on earth. I must also add that, frankly, a lot of gender stereotyping in dance is unnecessary.

Anyway, I've just started learning a new dance in class, a Muruga Kautuvam. Guess it's still a long way for me from my dream of a dance of Nataraja, but to think positively, you can also say it's another step in that direction. And I should remind myself to always feel as proud as a peacock while dancing.