Columnist
Guru Mayadhar Raut

Dame Luck has always been
an unpredictable mistress,
stalking and wooing some all
the time, while visiting others
in fits and starts or not at all.
That for a prosperous career in
the dance field one needs good
fortune and the right breaks as
much as prowess is an accepted
fact.
While discussing the restructuring of Odissi in the early
fifties, through what was
known as the Jayantika effort,
the names of Guru-s Pankaj
Charan Das, Deba Prasad Das
and Kelucharan Mohapatra are
frequently taken by scholars
and dance practitioners. Less
often mentioned is the fourth
dimension to this revivalist
square, Guru Mayadhar Raut
who, for years, has settled down
in New Delhi to which place
he shifted in the year 1967, at
the behest of two young guru-s
both of whom had their training
under him, namely Harekrushna
Behera and Surendranath Jena.
On July 20th 2005, a threeday Odissi event at the India
International Centre (IIC)
heralded Guru Mayadhar Raut's
75th birthday. Intrigued about
one who is registered as having
been born in the village of
Kantapanhara near Banki in
Orissa on 6th July 1933 celebrating seventy five years in
2005, I asked the Guru's
daughter Madhumita Raut, now
the custodian of the Guru's more years of service before birth was recorded as 1933 in
mantle, about this curious retirement, because he never the passport in an ad hoc
arithmetic. "He is the only guru worked for the government.