What do you do when you feel extremely happy or excited?
Well, a lot of people would agree that they dance all their feelings out whenever they are undergoing strong emotions in life.
Dance is one of the things that unite people and some special dance forms also represent the culture of a country, like an age-old dance form like Kathak.
But have you ever thought that a dance form can connect the two distinct geographies like the eastern and western worlds? No, right?
Well, today we are going to tell you about a person, Ms. Paramita Bhattacharya, who made Kathak (the age-old Indian dance form practiced in India) a tool to connect both worlds.
Paramita Bhattacharya – In Love With Kathak
Hailing originally from Kolkata, Paramita’s interest in Kathak arose when she first saw the “National Program of Dance“ on the Doordarshan television channel, which was then the national television channel in India. The moment she noticed a very pleasing form of dance which included a lot of spinning and the melodious sound of the ankle bell, she asked her parents to let her learn more and more about the dance form and later she got to know about this dance form being called Kathak.
At that time all she wanted to do was to learn kathak, and she was lucky enough to have Padma Vibhushan Pandit Birju Maharaj Ji as her guide.
Her teachers in school used to love her dance performances to an extent that they always picked her for all the cultural shows be it for a musical solo performance, group performance, or dance drama. She was always looked up to whenever such kind of events used to happen in the school.
As time passed by she started to learn more and more about the technical details of kathak which made her fall in love with it.
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Struggles
While she was in school, Paramita was told to focus more on academics than on her dance. But she managed to strike balance between her studies and dance through her hard work. But the real struggle started when she had to find a teacher nearby who could teach her. But the unavailability of the internet and lack of information access made her problems worse.
She used to live with her parents in a small industrial town where her father used to work as an engineer. The big city was far away so she could not find a teacher nearby.
However, her search to find a Kathak teacher came to an end after one year, when she finally enrolled in a class that required her to walk two miles daily and then travel 2 hours on a public bus.
This whole process continued for two and a half years when her father took a transfer to a nearby big city which eased her travel to the classes.
By the time she reached high school, she was awarded the highest dance degree “Sangeet Prabhakar” with first-class grades.
Current Scenario
Paramita is a “Kathak” dance exponent. “Kathak” dance form represents storytelling, and we call the artist ‘Kathakar’, the storyteller. Paramita loves to improve his storytelling act in every dance performance, she loves to present stories through Kathak dance movements related to social issues.
She was always keen to spread the art of Kathak storytelling to all nooks and corners of the world. But this proved to be a problem for her when she tried to present an Indian art form in Foreign land alongside ballet and other classical dance forms.
She kept pursuing her passion and kept representing her art form throughout the world. Slowly and steadily her dance journey led to many exciting opportunities in India and abroad.
She is now getting worldwide recognition and has bagged many awards including the Nritya Bhushan award and also got the certificate of commitment from the World Book of Records, London.
The audience liked her performance to an extent that she received an invitation from a beauty pageant organization in the United States Of America to represent India as a participant. She grabbed this opportunity and represented Indian art, tradition, and culture in a beauty pageant and bagged the award of excellence.
She is currently living in Los Angeles, USA, and is still planning on taking the dance form to a higher level.
We at Mad4India are proud of her and wish her great success in her future endeavors.
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Featured Image – facebook.com
Just like her, there are many other women who are working for women’s empowerment.
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beautifully narrated the story , I liked the style very much .. looking forward to reading more such stories..