Dancing To The Tune Of Life

One day to go for an All India Classical Dance Competition where 40,000 competitors will flash their sheen, you expect some amount of tension in one among them. But what when one has years of experience to rely on?

Meet Pukhrambam Lilabati Devi, a student of MPA Dance (Bharatanatyam) in University of Hyderabad (UoH). Having won enough number of Government scholarships to make her easily lose count, she is an alumnus of the premier dance institute of South India, Kalakshetra in Chennai. That’s not it; she is also a Sangeeta Nataka Academy junior dancer awardee. No wonder, the Vice Chancellor of UoH has nominated her as an Academic Council member for the running academic year.

Achievements of this genre, you would think, would add some arrogance to a twenty something. But Lila believes that it is discipline and respect that set apart dancers from commoners. She laments that most students in the campus do not even properly greet their teachers. For her, a reverent Namaste to any elderly person is a must. Listen to her talking about her Guru Leela Samson for a moment, and you will feel nostalgic about something we hardly see these days - Gurutva.

Having given about 350 performances all over India, Lila still thinks her real passion lies elsewhere. She wants to do her PhD in Bharatanatyam and serve her home state as a professor in Manipur Central University. She chose to do a theory oriented course in UoH after her rigorous practical stint at Kalakshetra because of this.

All offers she got for performing abroad had to wait just because she did not want any interruption in this tapasya. The vigour of her dream comes forth when she explains that once she gets her PhD, she will not get married. It will restrict her from imparting knowledge the way she wants to.

At the same time, she is also an ardent believer that dance is as much a men’s art as women’s. She explains that in no walk of life, can be one complete without the other – “Where there is Siva, there has to be Parvathi and vice versa.” While she acknowledges that her audience prefers Thillana among the many dance repertoires, her personal favourites are Padam and Ashtapadi. She confesses that her only other interest than dance is lawn tennis.

With no normal dreams at all, Lila is still a normal girl. What mark her apart are just her crystal clear ambitions and deep roots in our culture. If action embedded in passion takes one to unfathomable heights, here is a perfect example for that. Only thing, she dances up towards those heights!