When you’ve worked with everyone from Rajinikanth to Dhanush before hitting 25, chances are you’re on your way to being a hall of famer. Those chances only get better when you’re one of more recognised YouTubers around and one of your many videos, Can Love Change This World?, has racked up half a million hits. For Anusha Swamy though, taking chances is second nature. With a filmography that includes R...Rajkumar and Kochadaiiyaan as one of the choreographers, she could have easily continued signing films. But that’s not all that she’s about. Not right now, anyway.
From pioneering the Epic Show in 2012 — where she got kids from varied economic backgrounds and trained them to stage a killer dance show — to starting Make a Change, a movement to educate kids from funds raised through selling clothes, candles and other stuff that she’s hand crafted, it’s safe to say that she really, really cares about getting kids into schools.
Which is sort of anti-climactic. Seeing as how her penchant for dance got her booted from classes frequently, “I was kicked out of school in 11th grade as I used to dance a lot. That’s about the time I started working, when I was 15,” she recalls before adding, “You don’t always have to get 90% to get through life. I was an average student in school, but nobody can go through what I did the way I did.” She eventually put herself into college where she took a stab at Food Science Management, but dancing with the stars (Really, really big stars) really ate into her time in college.
And that’s when The Epic Show happened. The show involved hours of training the kids, so they could rock the stage. “It’s about bringing together different classes of kids, for them to understand what childhood is. It was more like ‘each one teach one’. All I wanted to do was to make them feel like stars,” says Anusha, who, as part of the Down Syndrome Federation of India, has spent a lot of time with kids with Down Syndrome. That tryst happened while she was planning part II of The Epic Show, and that changed her life. “When I met them, it was like “why didn’t I meet these guys before?”. I connected with them instantly. It’s beautiful how they change your life. I wouldn’t call it a disability. I’d call it a different ability,” she says.
Around the same time, Anusha, stumbled upon an idea that would then become a movement called Make a Change that would help realise children’s dreams of going to school. “It was very out-of-the-box for me because I didn’t think of it as an initiative. Like any other girl, I was watching Gossip Girl on TV and was attracted to fashion. I stitched a dress and put up a post on Facebook saying I’d be selling it for 500 bucks and that it would help educate a child. About 200 people placed orders,” says the 25-year-old dancer.
This summer, Anusha is organising a workshop for children where they will learn to dance. “We’re going to try and make them mingle with kids with Down Syndrome. I do this because it makes me feel like I’m part of something bigger.”
Reach out: http://anushaswamy.com