I’ve said time and again that I’m not a dancer. It doesn’t come naturally to me, nor have I ever seen the fun in it. People seem to like it though, and they spend hours jerking their bodies around to a beat (sometimes off beat as well), and I’ll confess that I have often sat and laughed at people in nightclubs.

However. Complain though I may, and ridiculous though it may seem, dancing is an integral part of Hindi films. Yeah yeah, we all go on about new age cinema this and evolving audience tastes that, but crank up the volume on Ahun Ahun and suddenly everyone’s doing pelvic thrusts. Let’s all just face it, shall we? We’re Indian, and we like our heroes and heroines to express their feelings in song and dance, dammit! Those background and montage songs are all very well, but when you want the audience to really sit up and take notice, you’re gonna have to choreograph some steps, throw in backup dancers and start flashing the lights.

This being the case, I tried my best to sidestep the whole dance thing as best I could, for as long as I could. But as they say, you can’t escape your destiny. (Don’t ask who ‘they’ are, I honestly couldn’t tell you. But they do say that, trust me.) My new film, titled I Hate Luv Storys starts shooting at the end of this month (anyone making numerology jokes will be assassinated by ninjas), and as I sat listening to the freshly-recorded songs, the realisation started to dawn on me; they were expecting me to dance!

Panicking, I told Punit, the director, that I can’t dance to save my life. “I’m terrible”, I told him. “People who’ve seen me dance have started bleeding from their eyes and subsequently gone blind.” But he would have none of it. “Well in that case, you better start rehearsing now,” he told me. “The more practice you have, the better.” This struck me as a point I could not argue.

Which brings me to my life as it’s been for the past week.

I started rehearsing with Bosco, our choreographer. My body hurts in ways and places I can’t describe (children read my column as well), and I don’t have the energy to walk across the room to put the fan on. But something strange started to happen yesterday.

The music was blasting, we’d been at it for a couple of hours, and I suddenly realised that I was...not miserable. Things weren’t too bad, it kind of felt like... I was having fun. I probably won’t be going out and dancing recreationally or anything, but I have to admit. It’s not half bad!