We live in an age of image projection where we carefully cultivate choices and in turn are easily defined by them. When even our use of emojis is examined as an indicator of our personality, naturally, when it comes to exercise, it’s no different.
What should perhaps be a personal choice becomes a conversation point, a social media declaration, and an extension of our overall image we cultivate.
While multiple lifestyle choices should free our minds collectively, instead, often we use them to further box both ourselves and others in.
When I tell people I have recently taken up dance classes as a form of exercise, they express surprise and look at me as if seeing me with new eyes. I have to repeat that it’s as a means of exercise, and I’m not planning on a second career as a pole dancer.
Similarly when for some years I took up yoga for exercise, I found people seemed more inclined to begin conversations on spiritual topics in which I have zero interest.
Dance is for fun girls, Yoga is for spiritual girls. Weight lifting is for aggressive girls. If you cycle you’re bold and daring. And so on…

Our need to define analyse and attribute deeper meaning to mundane lifestyle choices which we often may pick as casually as clothes in a mall leads to a culture of over sentimentality and avoidable stereotypes not fit for a modern age.

We all agree we have to exercise, this is not contested with so much awareness of the need of physical activity today. For the professionals in the industry as well as for many consumers it probably helps to turn an everyday chore into something exotic. I’m not saying all people with fitness routines don’t love them. Maybe they do or maybe they don’t. Maybe like me they are merely trying to stay fit. We all brush our teeth in the morning but no one goes around making a case for it as an activity with deeper meaning. Yet, cults are built around our exercise routines.
Well I am practical when it comes to this. Dance is fun to watch and wonderful to admire, but it’s a pain to do oneself. It’s not the pain of yoga where one is required to sit still and hold poses, but it’s still a pain and requires its own effort and discipline and technique – and in the case of dance, tricky footwork – that any other form of physical training will require.
Yet I barely find anyone who doesn’t absolutely love their chosen physical activity of the moment. I find it slightly incredulous. My theory is that in an attempt to live up to the strong multi tasking superhumans we have convinced ourselves we are, we have created illusions that everything we do is our calling, and therefore not only do we love it, it is who we are. We want to focus on the science of the happy pheromones released in exercise, but avoid any mention of the excruciating hell in the moments we are trying to touch our toes. We don’t want to talk of the pain in the gain because it goes against our theory of positive vibes pop psychology we have become slaves of.

You can argue that fitness being the end, the fitness circus culture is a means to pique curiosity and creates interest for others who need motivation. However, it’s also equally possible it deters people from joining a structured work out activity class – they feel inadequate in their passion for the chosen form of exercise they see around them and perhaps wait endlessly for a similar calling.

I take dance classes. I don’t do it because I’m a secret Shakira at heart. Or because it’s my divine calling. I dance because i want to stay fit and I owe it to myself. That should be reason enough. Must we attach a sentimentality to it?

I was a little girl when I saw my mother dance on stage. It wasn’t the first time because she had always been a dancer of the traditional Bihu form, from Assam, that is my home state. As I grew older, I began to marvel at how uninhibited and enjoyable her performance was. Being the daughter of a good dancer can have its perils; I decided to not do what I could never be better at, or as good as. So dancing was one of the things that never belonged on my must-do list. As I grew into a teenager, I started feeling it was silly that people would break into a dance, at a marriage, at a family friends house, at a picnic, as an ode to happiness. I’m sure there were a million ways to show happiness than making some ridiculous moves.

And so, a lifetime through school and college made me look at dancing at something so frivolous that it was not needed, especially for a person like me who was heavily into reading books and animated intellectual discussions on any topic you could think of!

But, as time flew and I grew older and wiser and life taught me that the joyous moments are fleeting and it is the sad moments that can take over one’s life completely, I started understanding the sense and the necessity of dance. I realised one didn’t have to be an expert (nobody but trained dancers are) to be able to express enjoyment, happiness and a moment of paradise that could be encapsulated in that heady moment of dancing your sorrows away. It was like a catharsis to realise this that dance is as essential to life as poetry, art, writing and cinema are. Finally, I understood what my mother felt when she started dancing and is still a very exuberant dancer, to date.

Music, I have always been a hardcore lover of, but its cousin dance was relegated to the shadows, just for that time.

As I grew and evolved, I started loving dance for its expression and energy and ability to take away all the accumulated stress that we are guilty of hoarding inside ourselves. Today when I break into an impromptu jig with my kids, I see my husband giving me a knowing smile with a ‘I told you so’ look because unlike me, he has been a big fan of all dance forms. It’s his way of telling me to join the club, that I ran away from, all these years.

And a year and a half before, we both happily shook a leg with Pulkit Sharma at You Can Dance, Dance Wellness that had just started its operations. It was an enjoyable experience with such an enthusiastic teacher that this young boy is. And I’m hoping, post lockdown and post Covid, we will soon be able to attend more of his classes and jive away to eternity.
As the King of Dance said, “To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?”
– Michael Jackson
Actually, yeah. I kind of feel my music now.

(Tashneem Ali Chaudhury has been a lifestyle journalist for the last 25 years and writes with passion on any topic that interests her. Her work has featured in Hindustan Times, Times of India, New Indian Express and Mumbai Mirror, among others. She blogs at www.tashneemreviews.com)