she is not a malayali but by her own admission she has had an affection akin to that of motherly love to its art form mohiniyattam a discipline she embraced after becoming a mom it was when she was in her early thirties that she started learning it in detail however veteran dance guru bharati sivaji subsequently became a person who devoted almost 40 years to keralas traditional dance form nourishing it and doing all that she could to take it around the world when kerala was hit by heavy floods recently the dancuese who grew up in delhi and hails from tamil nadu was in alappuzha the experience of being in the thick of affairs made her express the pain in the best way she could through a unique dance production named kerala smriti it was recently staged at india international centre delhi it depicts a variety of stages the state has gone through from its creation to the arrival of mahabali for onam this year urging it to get up and fight says bharati who will soon be performing it in chennai and bengaluru as welli was working on my third book and meeting a few people in kerala for the same when the floods began getting worse actually i had to wrap up my work midway and leave the state which was already getting waterlogged in many areas mine was the last flight from kochi airport post which it remained shut for a long time but the picture of water engulfing kerala a state that i love immensely remained a painful visual in my mind says bharati who has worked for many years with the likes of kavalam narayana panicker to enrich mohniniyattam the dancer says she recalled all things positive of this space culture people to put together a performance expressing her emotions i knew it to be a temporary situation and the people of kerala are basically very brave they like to fight and resist negativitiy so i thought it will be good to highlight the positives of kerala and show how a united society will bring it back on its feet along with six of my students i staged it and it showed how it emerged from the sea as parasurama threw the axe how it has been a blessed land with its own rich traditions the thunder and rains that cast a spell of gloom and how mahabali enters the scene inspiring the state to get up unite and work together to bring it back to normalcy explains the veteran she has used the poetry from the 15th century text named chandrolsavam for the performance the dancer who has written two books about mohiniyattam is now working on her third on the aesthetics of mohiniyattam it also has a lot more of my perspectives of it she says she is also happy that as compared to the past mohiniyattam has a lot more takers now at the time i pursued it i