{"id":13888,"date":"2014-11-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2014\/11\/25\/how-hema-ramaswamy-found-healing-through-traditional-indian-dance\/"},"modified":"2014-11-25T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-25T12:00:00","slug":"how-hema-ramaswamy-found-healing-through-traditional-indian-dance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2014\/11\/25\/how-hema-ramaswamy-found-healing-through-traditional-indian-dance\/","title":{"rendered":"How Hema Ramaswamy Found Healing Through Traditional Indian Dance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/codeswitch\/2014\/11\/15\/362310725\/how-hema-ramaswamy-found-healing-through-traditional-indian-dance\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p>USA, November 19, 2014 (By Arun Venugopal, WNYC): Hema Ramaswamy, a young Indian-American woman with Down syndrome, performs her arangetram. After many years of preparation, Hema Ramaswamy of Middletown, N.J., is ready to unveil her arangetram, which literally means &#8220;ascending the stage.&#8221; It is a major accomplishment that takes years of preparation. This moment, when a student of dance or music asserts her artistic independence, usually happens in the teen years. Ramaswamy is 23.<\/p>\n<p>Ramaswamy, who has Down syndrome, originally began dancing for health reasons. &#8220;But then it became part of her, and she really loves and enjoys it, and it took her 13 years with a lot of challenges, midway, to complete this,&#8221; explained her father, Ram. &#8220;And now today is a perfect day for her &#8212; her graduating in this art.&#8221; She was able to achieve this despite her diagnosis and despite two major surgeries for a dangerous leak of cerebrospinal fluid. Her father said dance has strengthened Ramaswamy&#8217;s muscles and given her fine motor skills she simply didn&#8217;t have before.&#8221;I feel so happy in dancing,&#8221; she beams, surrounded by a flurry of doting aunties while preparing for her performance.<\/p>\n<p>Her father tells the crowd that Ramaswamy&#8217;s arangetram was more than a dance graduation; it was the day she became, in the eyes of the world, a full individual. Having achieved this goal, Ramaswamy says, she now plans to go to college.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source USA, November 19, 2014 (By Arun Venugopal, WNYC): Hema Ramaswamy, a young Indian-American woman with Down syndrome, performs her,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}