Dance with me

“My love for dance started at about the same time as my passion for making films,” says an excited Kunal Kohli. Besides winning critical and commercial acclaim with films like Hum Tum and Fanaa, Kohli is now a household name, thanks to his stint as a judge on Star One’s Nach Baliye.
“I was always an active part of theatre in school. I loved theatre. I used to act in all the school plays,” he recalls. “Even as a kid, I used to visualise my stories as the end product, not realising that I was actually charting up what I later learnt in technical terms, a storyboard.” Kohli never restricted himself to just acting or making storyboards. “I would even write songs to go with the mood of the play,” says the alumni of The Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai.
Bookish or dreamy as he may seem till now, Kohli discloses that he was a real mischief maker. “Whenever the teachers had a complaint against a student, they would file a report in the student’s diary that his or her parents would have to sign for the next day,” he says.
“One particular year, I ran out of the complaint pages in my diary and my teacher had to buy me a new diary on her account to file a complaint,” he says laughingly. The repeated complaints would get him into trouble at home but Kunal Kohli had his ways. “I would get the complaints signed alternatively by my parents. They were both strict and saved myself a lot of scolding with the technique,” he quips.
But no technique seemed to work at the annual parent-teacher meet. “While the parents of other students would spend around five to 10 minutes with a teacher. Every teacher took at least 15 minutes to talk about me to my parents. The complaint varied from eating my lunch in class to being talkative and everything that I should not be doing in class.”
And there was more, “I can never forget one Tuesday morning at school. The detention for students would be announced in the morning assembly and that Tuesday morning, it was announced that I would was handed a second detention for bunking my detention,” he says bursting into laughter.
“The teachers would actually escort me to the detention room in fear that I would jump the walls and escape again,” he adds catching his breath.
So though he did not go for any formal dance lessons as a kid, we can surely say, that Kunal Kohli has a reputation for keeping people on their toes.

Published in Hindustan Times Next on November 23, 2006