‘I want to produce the best hip-hop dancers in India’ says Dinit Roham

After a scintillating series of dance numbers and a dance battle, Showtime 3.0, External Force Dance Academy’s annual show came to an end. Blown away by the energetic and near to perfect act by 100 artistes varying across 10 styles in 100 minutes, we got the opportunity to talk to the man behind the show, Dinit Roham.

Oblivious of the name he has earned, Dinit was as down to earth as anyone could ever be. Talking about his journey, Dinit said, “Dance came naturally to me. I knew a lot of hip-hop moves even before I knew what hip-hop was.” He began dancing seven years back and formed his first dance crew in college and gave it his all. When the dance crew broke up, Dinit was literally on the streets but managed to get past it. His passion for dance has him currently running three dance centers across the city. And this is not where it ends. Having choreographed in almost every college in Pune, winning several dance festivals and competitions — both state and national level — Dinit is also presently a visiting cultural faculty at many esteemed institutions such as IIT Kanpur for instance.
His main inspiration to begin dancing was Ganesh Hegde and Michael Jackson. He watched videos to learn and correct his moves and was soon among the first generation of hip-hop dancers in Maharashtra. Dinit has just one vision, he says, “I want to produce the best hip-hop dancers across the country. So good that when they represent India internationally they put the others to shame.” It was this vision of his that attracted several other dancers and dance crews from around India to follow in his footsteps. Rohan Jadhav. who earlier belonged to a rival dance crew, joined Dinit and his academy five years back primarily because of Dinit’s vision. “Dinit is an inspiration for all of us. I will never give up dancing and a part of the credit for this goes to him,” says Rohan.
Dinit plans on having an international workshop soon wherein renowned hip-hop dancers from across the globe would come under one roof to train the participants. This is just the start to several other opportunities he provides the dancers of Pune. Seeing almost every student run up to him to know how they did on stage was proof enough to see the respect they had for Dinit, but after the short conversation we had with him, we knew that this respect was well earned.