Q. Did you always want to be a dancer?
A. Mentally, my training started when I was a six-year-old. The atmosphere at home and outside was artistic. There was always someone singing, playing the tabla while my father was choreographing. I started performing at the age of nine, and then at college events and cultural functions. I wasn’t serious about it then. I was more inclined towards sports. But like they say, you can’t avoid the pull of khaandani khoon (ancestral lineage). Once, when I was 21, I was playing cricket with my friends and injured myself. No one paid much heed to it. They just asked me to go home and put some medicine on the wound, while they continued to play. The next day I had to perform. After the performance, unlike the day before, many people came up to me and complimented me for my dance. That adulation made me realise that all of us love to be appreciated and that acted as a driving force for me to take up dancing professionally.

Pandit Birju Maharaj. Pic/Sayed Sameer Abedi