Ballet instructor Yehuda Maor is getting Mumbai's youths on to their toes

Maor, an Israeli-American ballet teacher, is helping popularise the classical dance among the young and restless of Mumbai

Yehuda Maor’s jaw drops. He is reliving a moment from his childhood in the 1950s when, aged six or seven, he had just seen the film version of a Bolshoi Ballet recital of Swan Lake. “It was just ‘Wow’. I can’t explain,” says the Israeli-American, still wide-eyed some 70 years later. He grew up in the culturally rich, mostly unreligious atmosphere of a kibbutz (commune) near Haifa in Israel, where Brahms would play at home, the opera and theatre were weekly fixtures, and children took piano and singing lessons. But nothing caught his imagination quite like the light, graceful movements