This week for our weekly edition of the Hyderabond, The Pioneer connects with Dr. Srishti Budhori, popularly known as the “Dancing Doctor”, gets candid about her love for dance, being a paediatrician, and her association with the “City of Nizams”.
Tejal Sinha
Let the beauty of what you love to be what you do,” they said. And today, our guest is a living example of this well-known saying.Dr. Srishti Budhori, a paediatrician by profession and a passionate dancer, has very well managed to give priority to both professions simultaneously. While on one side you would see her having a fun conversation with her patients, you would also see her twirling with her “adaahs” on stage.
She began dancing at the tender age of four, the age when most of us would sit and enjoy playing with toys. But how did it all begin? The dancing doctor enthused, “Well, my parents noticed me dancing on Humma Humma, and that was at the age of one. I danced for two hours straight when they continued playing the same track. In the meantime, my mother would go to her clinic, attend her patients, and come back.
They noticed that right from the age of 1, I enjoyed swinging to music and dancing and watching movies with dance numbers. And thus, it made them think that if they wanted to encourage me and my talent, it would be better if they put me in something classical.”
“The only classical they knew was Kathak; they were coming from the north in the 90s, but so God wanted me to learn under my guru ji, and that’s how I came into learning Bharatanatyam, which now I have so fondly grown up learning, loving, and worshipping the art,” she says, crediting her parents for noticing the talent and nurturing it.
Sharing her experience of being trained under the aegis of Bharatanatyam stalwarts Guru Sri VS Ramamoorthy and Manjula Ramaswamy, she says, “There’s this line in Mohd Rafi’s Mann Tadapat Hari Darshan ko Aaaj song: bin guru gyaan kaha se paaun, which is very close to my heart. There I get to know the glory of the Almighty, and I’m fortunate enough to be blessed with gurus who can give me, take me, and leave me on this path of realising myself. My gurus have been the embodiment of all that I would want to be.
Right from the young age of being with them, I have subconsciously absorbed not only how to dance but also how to live my life, how to be a good person, how to tackle difficult situations, and how to be on the path of loving God and realising him and his miracles. In short, it’s been a surreal experience and a blessed one, and I hope to be born again in their company to realise these great souls.”
Her dad being an Army personnel, Srishti had the chance to travel to several different cities. However, her love for her dance made her stay here in Hyderabad.
She shares, “Right from age 4, I was in Hyderabad; my father was in the Army, and it was like I was born in one place and raised in several others. By the time I turned 4, we shifted to Hyderabad, and that’s when my parents were looking for a dance school for me to have classical experience. I’ve been here since then mainly because of my dance, and my mother stayed back here and my father kept on going to his postings.”
But what got her to become a doctor? “My mother happens to be an idle-to-acquisition physician who has been in the city for 33 years. I grew up watching her all my life and seeing how she made a huge difference in people’s lives, and I was so inspired by her and her dedication to her art form, the art of medicine, that when the time came to take up biology, it really interested me because of the beauty of God and our bodies, which are his creation. Science is art, and art is science, as they say.
It does indeed, and later when my parents gave me the option to choose dance or medicine or whatever I wanted to do. I wanted to do both: I wanted to be the doctor who touches people’s lives and the dancer who elevates their souls at different levels. I wanted to give back to people in a way that makes me happy too; it gives me joy, and I think it was all destined and godly, and I’m finally able to do this.”
Dancing and being a doctor are not just poles apart; at times, both professions can also get too hectic, as you spend most of your time in the hospital or on the stage. We were eager to know how she manages both. To this, she happily admits, “My master, my guru ji, always said that you should give 100 per cent to the role that you’re portraying, and I did take that very seriously because when I’m in the hospital, I’m purely Dr Srishti, and when I’m on stage, I’m the dancer or the character I’m portraying, so I try to give 100 per cent to whatever I’m doing at.
There are days when the load comes on one side more and the other goes up, but I try to balance it out by compensating, for instance, when I’m too busy in the hospital, I take some time off from dance because sometimes I’m also doing my pg and attending night duties, whenever I get some extra time I give that to my practice, to do the basics, to do choreographies. Similarly, I do try to take time off, thanks to my senior doctor,
consultants, and the hospital, who give me time off when it’s really needed to pursue my passion for dance, and that is the time I give my 100 per cent to practising and improving in dance. It’s a journey, and I’m still learning. There’s a long way to go; it’s just the beginning, but I’m learning myself as I go on this.”
Ending the conversation on a brighter note, the “dancing doctor” says, “Hyderabad has been my home forever now, and I have always seen it through the eyes of a child, then later as a dancer, and now finally I’m getting to see it as a doctor too. The city has been great since its metro culture and now seeing people from all aspects of their lives and from various parts of the country.”
