Dreams come true for Gayathri

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Gayathri Vijayalekshmi, a retired teacher residing in the capital is on cloud nine.Her dreams will come true on Saturday, when she will make her maiden visit to the Sabarimala Lord Ayyappa temple, and also perform Bharatanatyam at the hill shrine.

She retired as a professor and head of Electrical and Electronics Department of the TKM College of Engineering, Kollam.Gayathri had to stop dancing at the age of 26, two years after she started teaching at the college. Gayathri started learning dance at the age of nine. Her first guru in Bharatanatyam was PG Janardhanan Master of Vadanappally. Just four years into retirement she was encouraged to do a dance performance by her students.Her performance after several years was impressive.

Her children also were impressed by the dance video and encouraged her to do more performance.”It was the beginning of my second life. I joined as a student under my former dance teacher V Mydhili of Midhilalaya Dance Academy. She had taught me for two years while I was doing MTech at CET in Thiruvananthapuram,” she said.

Her first performance in her second innings was in 2016. She did a one-hour long Bharatanatyam kacheri at Vyloppilly Samskrithi Bhavan three years later. She got numerous stages, including those at Attukal and Vadakkumnathan temples thereafter.

Interestingly, the performance in Sabarimala would be her 100th stage after she took again to dance just four years into retirement. Gayathri says her children Unnimaya, Yadukrishnan and their families are her biggest support. She has also acted in a short film “Grandma” and  a cinema “Class by a soldier”, both directed by Chinmayi Nair, a Plus-I student.