As a Telugu girl brought up in Tamil Nadu, Yamini Krishnamurthy used to wander inside the precincts of the vintage shrine in Chidambaram town to where her family had moved in from southern Andhra. The granite sculptures at the 10th-century Nataraja temple with the dancing Shiva as the chief deity fascinated the four-year-old no end—so much so, she spent hours gazing at their dynamic postures.The impressions were so deep that Yamini decided they would do nothing but dance the rest of her life. Her family, though, wasn’t amused by the idea. “It wasn’t that they had a dislike for dance. They didn’t want me to be seen struggling by taking it up as a full-time career,” she notes, much later in an interview.