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Ranjana Gauhar has many a scrumptious tale to share
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PHOTO: SHANKER CHAKRAVARTY
WHAT A DISH! Odissi exponent Ranjana Gauhar at Blooms in Hotel Intercontinental Nehru Place.
If smiles were a sweet dish, then Odissi dancer Ranjana Gauhar would have us all overweight, at the rate she serves them up. Stunning in a bandhej (tie-and-dye) Udaipur sari with glasswork, whose colour can only be described as `coconut barfi pink', Ranjana looks, well... quite a dish. At Hotel Intercontinental Nehru Place, in the heart of New Delhi's business district, Ranjana is sandwiched between commitments: a visiting family on the one hand, and a festival appearance at the Kalidas Samaroh in Madhya Pradesh in a few days.
Packed schedule
With rehearsals, classes, meetings, the classical dancer, who also makes tele-films and serials, has quite a bit on her plate all times. No wonder it is difficult to convince her to eat!
Settling down at the hotel's Lounge and Bar, she opts for a cup of coffee, refusing to be tempted by the chicken tikkas on offer. The restaurant is quiet and spacious, just the place for an afternoon chat. But then an option more tempting turns up, and she decides to move to Blooms, the hotel's 24-hour coffee shop.
It is delightful to take a table in the awning area, protected from the sky but fanned by a natural breeze, with a view of the garden. The cappuccino arrives, frothy and pleasantly aromatic. Bloom's menu includes snacks like the Intercontinental club sandwich, kathi rolls, grilled kulcha, among others. But the slim danseuse is careful. Extra calories do not find favour with her.
She also stakes claim to being a good cook who can please your palette without increasing your girth. "I make very good chicken stew," she says. "Absolutely clear, very few calories." But if you like something more sumptuous, the Padma Shri recipient, known as a gracious hostess, can whip up a fine chicken or mutton biryani, or baked vegetables.
Samosa chaat
At Blooms she settles for samosa chaat, a fancy-looking dish that seems a cheerful cross between dahi papri and crumbled samosa. Topped with a pappad cone perched at a rakish angle, it is tangy and sweet, salty, crunchy and soft all at once.
Ranjana, a disciple of Odissi gurus Mayadhar Raut, Aloka Paniker and the late Srinath Raut, founded the Utsav Education and Cultural Society in 1987. She is also a documentary and tele-serial maker, whose projects include a serial on Jayadeva's Gita Govind, the documentary Odissi Chandrika and a 10-episode feature, Nupur: Presentations of Indian Classical Dance. Though she started dancing at a young age, she was already out of college when she started learning Odissi, which now could fairly be called her identity. "But then, in those days we finished college early," she adds.
Theatre days
While training in Odissi, she joined the theatre group Abhiyaan, directed by Rajinder Nath, as a creative outlet.
"I have done eight plays. I was the heroine, which I like to be in real life too... I don't want to be a celebrity. I prefer to be a hero. The qualification to be a celebrity seems to be a socialite. I think artistes do more service," she grins. "The first play was `Ghasi Ram Kotwal'. And who was my hero? Om Puri, just out of NSD."
Good stuff for compiling memoirs. Chatting over chaat can yield a lot of flavours!
ANJANA RAJAN
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