How a cheesy, Indian dance-fest re-awakened my unrelenting desire to travel to the world’s most fascinatingly seductive subcontinent   

Impossibly colourful, breathtakingly vibrant, relentlessly entertaining and hilariously cheesy, my evening in the company of the Merchants of Bollywood was the best fun I’ve had at the theatre for a very, very long time. Imagine sequins, colour, light shows, ridiculous overacting, satire and simply fantastic, infectiously energetic Bollywood dancing and musical rhythms, and you’ll only have captured half of the riotous evening that was had by all present. There was, truly, dancing in the aisles, and although my friend and I (just) stayed in our (highly-discounted, £10, yes!) seats, I absolutely loved it.

For reasons unknown, since I’ve never been to India and, as far as I’m aware, have no personal connections with the country, its culture, colours, languages, architecture and traditions fascinate me. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been in love with the fabulous array of fabrics, jewellery, pottery, flavours, spirituality, landscape, architecture and near-overwhelming bustle of humanity that emanate from all photographs and accounts of the region like the pulse from a raging, dancing heart. The more I find out about it, the more images, travel guides, travelogues, memoirs and magazine editorials that I see and read about the place, even the heart-wrenching accounts of the devastatingly unassailable levels of poverty, sexism, racism and innumerable other corruptions and injustices that sweep the subcontinent, only serve to make my yearning to travel and explore the faintly terrifying but completely irresistible maelstrom of the world’s largest democracy ‒ home to over 1 billion people, more complex, more confusing, more contradictory and more intoxicatingly fabulous than I can even fathom ‒ stronger.

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