This week it’s gonna be a brief on hand gestures, and gift culture that I follow. I’ve been learning odissi for 4 years now and my goal is to give out my gifts in whatever I do.

This is where the story starts. So basically I dont go to school, don’t write exams and don’t have any kind of certificate whatsoever. so I would have to make a portfolio. well my father had thought about this on a whole other level. He wanted to start giving out gifts. What he means by gifts - basically to show people your skills and to help people with them. A bunch of examples -

1. Me going on a road trip! And I have my ocarina with me so I start playing it and pleasure everyone’s ears! that’s a way of giving out my gift of ocarina

2. I know basic theory of odissi and I know how to play a few tunes on the ocarina so I make videos on the theory of odissi and a few tunes that I can play so the others who are using my videos will benefit from them.

3. The other thing I’m doing right now is blogging. I write my experiences and other things that I think can help other people and try to give out my gifts in this way.

so this week imma try and give out my gifts of odissi;) I’m gonna talk about mudras in odissi dance.

Mudras are divided in four parts in odissi -

1. asamyukta hasta mudras that are single hand gestures and there are 28 types of them.
2. samyukta hasta mudras where both your hands are used, and there are 23 types of these mudras.
3. Then there are nrutya hasta mudras, these mudras are the pure dance mudras selected out of asamyukta Hasta Mudras and samyukta Hasta Mudras. There are 17 of them and are used frequently during performances.
4. Finally there are Parampara Hasta Mudras. there are 10 of them and these are traditional Mudras used for easy understanding.

Now apart from all of this there are viniyogas. Each mudra can convey various messages so there are viniyogas. viniyogas are various slokas (verses) from olden day texts that convey a certain and appropriate message to the audience. It helps understand the story. That is viniyoga.

So that was about it. and i’ll be back with videos and how to do all of this.