July 27, 2011 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • Page 9 Glen Rock Asian Festival enchants borough library’s patrons by John Koster Krisha Anant and Aishani Das lit up the improvised dance floor at the Glen Rock Library as the opening act of the midsummer Asian Festival, and brought down the house with applause and friendly questions about Asian Indian dance and costume. “They are beginners -- baby bees,” said their dance teacher, Anita Ramaswamy, their dance instructor, who teaches classic Indian dance at her Nytra Sagar School in Nanuet, New York. Anant, 7, and Das, 5, gave a performance worthy of teenagers -- all the more remarkable since the two girls have only been studying classic Indian dance for a few months and only practiced the dances they shared with the Glen Rock audience for about 10 days. The girls were clad in colorful costumes that were tailormade and took about two hours to put on. The hair styling and hair jewelry took another half hour. The girls offered a skilled use of pantomime, facial expression, and graceful, acrobatic moves and poses to tell traditional Indian stories that reflect both the spiritual values and the day-to-day life of the country. India is a largely Hindu country, but also has the largest Muslim population on Earth, along with millions of Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Christians who are said to have been converted by the Apostle Thomas in New Testament times. The dances from southern India reflect the Hindu heritage, which combines a profound appreciation of nature and of humane conduct with some extremely colorful expressions of the many aspects of religion in art and culture. Hindu believers do not eat beef, and the strictest Hindu believers, like devout Buddhists, do not eat mammals of any kind. Buddhism, in fact, was founded in India as a reform Hindu movement, though today it is most prevalent in other Asian countries. During the festival, Glen Rock Library volunteer Lakshmi Ramesh painted the hands of the patrons with henna, an herbal dye, in a temporary body decoration esteemed all over tropical Asia and the Middle East. “Can you wash it off?” one girl asked with a mixture of concern and curiosity. “It washes off in a week or so, but you can’t wash it off right away,” Ramesh said. She added that the henna is Performers and participants at this year’s Asian Festival at the Glen Rock Library. purely herbal and did not contain dangerous chemicals. The table she sat at to paint hands was mobbed with delighted children who kept her very busy. Atsuko Hanashima offered another attraction: writing out the children’s names in katakana, phonetic Japanese. Hanashina wrote first, and the children copied her calligraphic inscriptions until they got it just right. Hanashima explained that the Japanese have three alphabets. Katakana, a phonetic alphabet based on (continued on page 22)