‘DO WHAT YOU WANT TO DO’

After retiring from her 27-year-old music teacher job in a government school in 2019, Ravi Bala Sharma arrived in Mumbai to spend time with her son, an actor and writer.

Then, the lockdown happened and she decided to fill her hours with her passion — dance. Ravi Bala was born to a musician dad and grew up with music and dance. She and her sisters and brothers were taught to play the tabla and other instruments and given singing lessons. As much as she loved everything she was learning, she loved dancing more. She’d learn by watching her older sister being trained in Kathak by an ustaad. “I don’t have Kathak training but I do it; it obviously helped that I have knowledge in song and music and know the mudras etc.,” says Ravi Bala who’s done her BED and Sangeet Prabhakar in tabla, sitar and vocals and an MA in Hindi.

Years after she’d learnt Kathak by watching her sister, fate lead her closer to her passion. “During the lockdown, one of my sisters shared a dance video, which I shared on Facebook,” she recalls. “It got some very good reviews and made me want to do it too.”

Ravi Bala’s son and daughter, who lives in Delhi, encouraged her, as had her husband did, when he was alive. Every time she grew nervous about society, her children would step in reminding her how it mattered to no one what she did in her time.

When she did finally upload a dance video, it raked in the views. Today, Ravi Bala, called fondly the ‘Dancing Dadi’, has 186K followers on Instagram. Youtube videos of her dancing to Bollywood numbers and performing folk dances, with her long and lusciously thick grey hair swaying about, have been going viral, and she and her energies at ‘her age’ have been quite the muse for several media channels.

Her mantra is simple. “Do what you’ve always wanted to do in life. And if you’re in a relationship that doesn’t let you follow what you like, fight your way through that; let your passions win.”