Bharatnatyam

I realise that the cost of doing one particular thing is that you can’t do another thing. And honestly, I loved computer symposiums and quizzing, and would regret never having done them in favour of something else. But I really wish I had learnt Bharatnatyam at some point in life.

This is not because of any newfound love of dance. It’s more because while I was researching fundaes for last month’s quiz, I realised that Bharatnatyam is not so much a dance form as a language which uses gestures, facial expressions, and body movements as its basic units. Compare this with Sanskrit, where the basic unit is a sound (or phoneme); Mandarin, where the basic unit is a character (or lexeme), and English, where there are really no atomic units – meaning is concentrated at the level of the word or even phrase thanks to English borrowing from other languages so relentlessly.

And right now I find that so totally cool. The whole idea that I can communicate a message without having to rely on words (spoken or written) is mindblowing. It’s a conceptual leap similar to understanding – grokking really – how for loops or function calls work for the first time.

Of course, the problem is that even if someone had pitched Bharatnatyam to me as a language instead of a dance back in school, I probably wouldn’t have been all that enthused. My fascination with languages didn’t really get ignited until after probably first or second year in college, where I learnt the joy of C++ and object oriented programming.

This is kind of tragic, considering learning Bharatnatyam is a tough ask now. It’s a three year commitment at least, and I have no idea if I’ll even be in the same city six months from now. As for other languages, my Mandarin lessons have been on hiatus for the past two months thanks to preoccupation with work and quizzes.

Sigh. Such are the things I miss out on.

0 Responses to Bharatnatyam

  1. maxaud says:

    Theres a much more obvious and equally beautiful expressive language. Sign 🙂
    Recently read Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks. Gives a lot of insight into it and opens up a whole new dimension to what we ever thought about language.

  2. Abhishek says:

    Exactly! came over all the way here from my bloglines – to tell you exactly what maxaoud points out. Damn him!

  3. Aadisht says:

    Abhinaya is a superset of sign language, I think. Incorporates postures and facial expressions beyond just signs. But now I should read Seeing Voices.

  4. maxaud says:

    that assumption is exactly what Seeing Voices sets out to dismiss. It simply is not a linear set of actions that makes up Sign. there are a whole lot of nuances involved including postures and facial expressions. It has a structure and grammar like any other full fledged language and the process of translation from English (or from any language for that matter )to Sign is just as complex as a translation from English to Chinese. Do read.

  5. Aadisht says:

    Ah, okay. Adding it to my want-to-read list.

  6. jigar says:

    I DON’T THINK IT IS EASY TO DANCE AND THAT DANCE I DON’T LIKE ALSO .BUT THAT IS A CUTURE OF TAMIL NADU

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