Don’t change the ways but change the way you walk and everything shall start falling into place.
Don’t change the ways but change the way you walk and everything shall start falling into place.
Vishakha Verma is the Founding Director of Vishakha Dance & Music Academy in Dubai and a reputed Dance Therapist. Her academy works in the field of inclusive therapy which is aimed at treating specially-abled kids with the help of dance.
Vishakha was born in Delhi. Her father was in NSG and her mother was a government teacher and an M.A. scholar in Sanskrit. She did her schooling in Delhi and then pursued Civil Engineering from Aurangabad.
Vishakha started learning Kathak from the age of seven. However, due to parental and societal pressure, she did engineering. This put a break in her Kathak journey. About seventeen years ago, after marriage, she moved to Dubai and it is there that her dreams started taking shape.
While in Dubai Vishakha was invited to a show where she noticed kids suffering from diseases like Cerebral Palsy, Autism, and on wheelchairs performing on stage. She terms this day as the real inspiration which drove her to start a dance academy for differently-abled kids. She credits her in-laws for providing all the necessary support in this decision.
She joined GEMS school in Dubai as a dance instructor and started going to some other institutes as well after school to teach dance free of cost and created a base for her future dream. She pursued a ‘Dance Movement Therapy’ course and read about child and human psychology to help in her dance therapy sessions.
Around four years back, she started Vishakha Dance academy which now has about 170 specially-abled kids learning Kathak thus increasing their confidence and boosting their morale.
Her first student was a 9-year-old girl suffering from cerebral palsy who could not even stand from her wheelchair. In just 9 months, that girl performed with Vishakha and she considers this as one of the biggest achievements of her life.
Vishakha talks about the toughest time of her life when she met with an accident and was bed-ridden for around a year. Doctors had even said that she would not be able to walk, let alone dance. However, she fought against all odds with her relentless determination.
Another difficulty she faced was the perception of society towards a dancer. She and her family had to listen to many things but she never gave up.
Her best childhood memory is when she casually participated in a Kathak dance competition and was selected to be trained at Kathak Kendra, Mandi house, Delhi. She still remembers the joy on the faces of her parents when they received the invitation letter.
Vishakha says that her greatest achievement was being awarded The Global Disability Award on 26th January by the government of India. It was accepted by her parents on her behalf and it is a proud moment for Vishakha.
Vishakha’s success mantra of life is to accept one’s flaws and mend one’s ways to correct them. She thinks that we can learn anything at any point in our life and hence should never feel disheartened.
Talking about her role models, Vishakha says her biggest inspiration is her mother who worked tirelessly all her life. She shows the same determination even today, takes on difficulties with a smile and this is what motivates Vishakha in tough times. She even tags her children to be a source of inspiration and that she learns every day something new from them.
For someone looking to be a dance instructor, Vishakha says they should be passionate about the same. Before anything, they should be a motivated dancer and have a sense of serving inside them.
In her free time, she likes to sit with her family and dance all alone to the tunes of her choice.