A short inspiring story.

The Ignited Soul                                                                                     By: Asawari 

She was beautiful. She was spontaneous. She was eccentric. She was Shaarda.Born and brought up in a small town of Madhya Pradesh called Vidisha, to a decent middle class family, Shaarda was just 5 years of age when she performed in a ladies’ sangeet at her Uncle’s wedding and the applaud she received was abundant. Shaarda, according to Hindu mythology, is the name of the goddess Saraswati, the goddess of art and wisdom. Shaarda was truly living up to her name in every way since childhood. She was fond of music, dance and was always an eye candy of the onlookers. Shaarda was quite a brat in her own charming way. She turned a lot of heads and made a lot of eyes roll on her various exuberant and vivacious performances. Home science or cooking was not at all her thing. It was as if she found herself the most superior while she danced at the tunes of her own little hums.

While she was not timid at that young age, her parents took a lot of care to avoid sending her to such cultural functions. Music and dancing at either functions or elsewhere was considered only to be enjoyed by the males or the men of the society. However, at that time, in India and especially in smaller towns and cities, extroversion in the cultural fields by girls was a taboo. Shaarda was young and a highly talented performer. No one in her family line was so talented at that age like she was. But also, the fact remained that she was a girl and she was growing. She went to the usual government school with her younger brother. Surprisingly, Shaarda’s parents were immensely particular about teaching her and sending her to the school and educating her so that she could be wise and face the competition like other children did. However, none of them permitted her to sing or dance. That was like armour which eventually had pins inside that pricked Shaarda deep inside her heart. Shaarda was inventive and wise. She was a beautiful looking teenager and yet she was much mature than her age. She dreamt of nothing but her dancing and capturing all the world’s love and respect. Her thoughts were rebellious and firm. She had a plan. Her father used to give her and her younger brother a little sum of money which they could either save or have some outside goodies with it. She started saving each single penny she earned like that inside a very secretly kept box of hers. She used to take the money each week and quietly keep that in her small safe which she hid with her books and stationary.
By the age of eighteen she had quite an amount of the money she had been wisely saving. She was not just dreaming for herself but was creating a platform for many others like her, who were shy or drawn back by the ideologies of the society. She bravely took a step forward and showed that money to her parents. Her parents were stunned and moreover confused of her doing. They asked her the reason and she, with the ultimate modesty, told them her plan which left them baffled. Shaarda wanted to learn dance and also wanted to open an institute wherein young dancers could come up and share their piece of innovation with her. Her dream was quite resolute and her ideas were pretty dauntless. May be she was born much before her league. Her parents were disappointed of her notions and quite firmly told her to stop thinking about all this.
In India at that time, male chauvinism had taken its toll on the lives of innocent young girls who had dreams not in their minds but in their hearts and souls. Shaarda didn't want to look back and abandon her dream, which was the only passion in her life. However the obstruction right from her house was heart-aching. Still, she was firm to her views and wanted to implement her plans anyway.
She started to give dance lessons to little girls by going to a little desolate place very near her own school. The seclusion was to separate herself from the dilemmas of her life and soak her in the meditation of dance. However, a group of people from her neighbourhood detested her cultural extroversion. Many of these were the same ones who loved when she danced and sang once when young. A group of boys started to follow her all the way to the place where she taught dance. They teased her and passed sleazy comments at her. Many of the parents withdrew their children from sending them to her as they thought that she took them to shady places. Neighbours tried to influence Shaarda’s parents by telling them crooked stories and insulting them time to time. Shaarda tried a lot to counter attack them by telling them the practicality and reality of the situation. But no one heard her. It was like she was kept in a vacuum glass box. She could see the people, people could see her, but none of them heard her. The sense of nothingness was disappointing.

Once when she was practicing her dance in an empty home, when her parents were out at their relatives’ place, a guy from the neighbourhood lured by Shaarda’s beauty and dance broke into her house. She was taken aback when she saw an intruder in her house. He started to pass slimy comments and tried to force himself on her. She revolted and shouted for help. To her surprise many of their neighbours were already peeking into her house and quite absurdly watching the scornful activity done by that man. She somehow managed to open the door. Somebody called her parents as well. The thwarted parents somehow managed to come to the girl’s rescue. However, the brutal guy started abusing Shaarda and blaming her for provoking him. He announced in the whole neighbourhood that she tried to make carnal and immoral deals with him and when he objected she tried to throw herself on him. The neighbours took it as a spicy pickle added to their routine meal. The news spread like fire. The devastated parents stopped talking to Shaarda. Shaarda was left with nothing but a lot of disrespect and abandonment from all over. She stopped going out of the house. She eluded everything. She was not only hurt physically but also distraught mentally. People threw stones at her when she came out of the house. Some called out her name with vulgar phrases, others approached to her as if she were some prostitute. Time passed by, but not the scenario.
Shaarda, who was now 30, unmarried and lonely was searching for the right people to approach. In the years that passed by she calmed herself and wrapped up to start afresh with only one person and that was herself. She was the leading lady of her own little world because she was valiantly fighting the ruthless ideology of the society and trying to establish sanity and practicality in the system. Shaarda was a delicate lady with a lion’s heart. She separated from her family and left all the relations behind her and went to Indore, a city which was much associated with mannered and practical people. She started to take dance lessons from a dance prodigy of the city, Anand. Anand was a trained classical Kathak and Oddisi dancer. He was unsure of her being able to learn at that age. But Shaarda’s passion was well ignited with a lot of vigour and ambition now. She learnt both the styles in less than three years. She always had a gorgeous face and mystic eyes of a dancer, and now she had graceful body language too. At the age of 35, she started her own dance school named Kala Kendra and there was a line of applicants. Batches after batches and medals after medals at all city ceremonies and functions gave her glamour and dignity for her craft. The only thing she wanted in life was to impart her craft to the others and earn respect.
She never went back to her house though. It was the most painful rule that she had made for herself and she abided it blindly. Indian society is blinded with pseudo-care which only evokes when one feels it has to evoke. The culture dilemma was not only heinous to her but it showed her the way to self-actualisation. She got a huge lesson for her whole life that passion could only be implemented in solitude and without any strings attached. The more one attaches oneself to human emotions and ideologies, the more one gets trapped in the whirlpool of cultural ideologies and one’s actual aims get diluted. Shaarda had a lot of respect for her parents and relatives, but she had lost the will to convince people that she was doing things right and with full morality. 
Yet, Shaarda was a happy soul now as she had her passion with her, her new friends and fans, the kids whom she taught, various artists who genuinely applauded her, plentiful medals and awards in her shelves and most importantly the courage, the conviction and the sense of self.