The condition sounds ominous. His prime disciple, Saswati Sen, has urged me not to ask Pandit Birju Maharaj the "usual" questions. "It's a waste of his time if you ask him what has been written all over," Sen points out.

So I ask him what makes him so popular with women. After all, the 78-year-old Kathak maestro is as much acclaimed - well, make that almost as much - for his dance as for his incredible charm.

"My ishtadev (favourite deity) is Krishna," he replies, his eyes twinkling. "I weave a lot of his tales into my dance. As a result, my facial expressions are compassionate. So maybe women find his reflection in me. And you know how Krishna was," he chuckles. "Women craved his attention," he says and shrugs helplessly.

Indeed, it's not difficult to fall prey to his charm. He speaks in a soft voice, his eyes smile and he laughs like a child. And he wins you over with his Luckhnavi andaaz - courteous words and ways his hometown Lucknow is known for.

When I enter his flat in Lutyens' Delhi, he greets me with a warm smile. Dressed in a kurta and dhoti, he is sitting cross-legged on a small bed in the drawing room.

He has been busy, for he and his troupe will soon be on a multi-city tour of the US, where they will perform a dance drama based on Romeo and Juliet. The music has been composed by Maharaj and jazz musician Louis Banks, and the dance has been choreographed by Sen.

The maestro's dance partner for more than four decades, Sen often crops up in his conversation. "Saswati ji has been a student for 48 years now, but still has the eagerness to learn new things. Often she stands at the back of my class and observes what I am teaching. She is a great student. Her eyes and facial expressions are beautiful," he says. "Now she has started speaking my mind, too. What you hear from her are often my dialogues. It seems I am inside her mind," he laughs.

Sen, a Bengali from Delhi, points out that one of her relatives is married into his family. "So we are family," she says. He understands Bengali and can sing a few Bengali songs. "Most of my dedicated disciples are from Calcutta. I talk to children in Bangla, but am scared of talking to their parents because I lack that fluency," he adds.

Bengal, one can tell, is close to his heart. His first stage performance was in Calcutta at the All Bengal Music Conference. "Everyone went wild over my performance. People even sat outside the hall to listen to my voice. I can never forget that applause. It rings so clear in my ears, till date."

He was 14 then, and had just started working at the Sangeet Natak Akademi in Delhi. It was Kapila Vatsyayan, later director of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, who helped him get the government job in Delhi. "She asked my mother why I was wasting my time in Lucknow and got us to Delhi," he adds.

As a child - he was born Brijmohan Mishra into the Kalka Bindadin Kathak gharana of Lucknow - he learnt dance from his father, Achchan Maharaj, and later his uncles, the legendary performers Shambhu Maharaj and Lachhu Maharaj. At the age of six, he started travelling with his father across the country. At seven, the Nawab of Rampur granted him a monthly salary of Rs 11.

Maharaj lost his father when he was a little over nine. "I could see my mother crying but couldn't understand why. My only aim in life from that day was to not let my mother have tears in her eyes. And many years later when my mother said she saw the reflection of my father in me, I cried like a child. I felt I was on the right path."

It wasn't easy for the young boy to move from Lucknow to Delhi. "The white buildings in Connaught Place all looked the same - I used to get lost there. Then one day I saw Regal Cinema and made it my landmark. I would first reach Regal, and then walk to my institute. Many years later I realised how long the route was," he laughs.

But now Delhi is his home - the city where he's lived for over six decades. His government flat is simply done up. The living room is modestly furnished with two cane sofas, a rug which has seen better days and a centre table. There are no awards on display. On the wall hang a few black and white family photographs. A corner portion is earmarked for images of several deities.

Birju Maharaj's forte is the way he has segued dance with drama. Critics believe that he broke the popular notion of Kathak being a dance of chakkars (spins) and tatkar (footwork). He has also scored the music and written the lyrics for several ballet compositions such as Mirza Ghalib, Katha Raghunath and Shiva Vivah.

His interests, clearly, are varied. He sings thumris, bhajans and ghazals, is a feted percussionist, writes poetry (at least one poem a day) and paints. His wife died 15 years ago, and he has three daughters and two sons, both of whom are Kathak dancers.

As a guru he is a tough taskmaster. "I have made many gurus in my lifetime, many more than my father and uncles did. I am not easy on my students," he says. But he rarely gets angry with anyone. "If I have to scold someone then I have to prepare myself a day in advance."

Maharaj has also had a long association with cinema. He worked for Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khilari, the Kamal Haasan-starrer Vishwaroopam, for which he won a National Award, and Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas and Bajirao Mastani.

"Working with dada in Shatranj Ke Khilari was a wonderful experience: He was a great man who wanted to show art in its pure form. Once I asked him, 'Is there nothing else on the set, dada?' and he said 'Maharaj, I want to show dance, even the fingernails of my dancer. I don't want to make any lavish sets.' I sang one of my father's thumris in the film and Saswatiji danced beautifully to it."

Bhansali's sets, on the other hand, were rich. "But his eye for detail in dance is minute. He is a trained Odissi dancer and when I used to teach Madhuri [Dixit], for Devdas, he would say, 'I am learning more than Madhuri'."

Dance reality shows on television, however, aren't his cup of tea. "They say dance, but I don't know what circus they are doing. They jump up and down. Hang on ropes, hop, skip and jump. It is anything but dance."

He likes to watch an English film almost every night and Jackie Chan and Sylvester Stallone are his favourite action heroes. And he likes to collect kites.

Maharaj has another passion. If he weren't a dancer, he would have been a mechanic. Give him a set of screwdrivers and a gadget and he can spend hours on it. He rips apart mobile phones and television sets, and puts them together again. He also repairs all the faulty gadgets in his house.

"I had a passion for cars and would tell my mother that if Kathak didn't work out, I would be a mechanic. And I would have been a fantastic one," he emphasises.

Fortunately for the world of dance, he rose to great heights as a Kathak exponent. He has won several awards, including the Padma Vibhushan, which was conferred on him in 1986. "I didn't even know what the Padma Vibhushan was. I had only heard about the Padma Shri. So when I got a phone call about the award, I said I would let them know if I would attend the ceremony. Then I called Saswati ji and asked her about it. She laughed and made me understand the significance of the honour," he smiles.

Maharaj now has one goal - of building his dream project, his dance school Kalashram in Delhi. For long years, he has been teaching out of rented premises in a government school in Delhi.

"I have put all my personal savings into constructing Kalashram. It's halfway through. I wish the government had helped me in setting up this school. Today, I ask my patrons for help," he says with a sigh.

He takes some supari out of a small steel container and is silent for a few minutes. He chews the areca nut thoughtfully and then says: "The government should appreciate an artiste when he is doing well. Bhimsenji [Joshi] and Bismillah Khan ji were presented the highest awards (Bharat Ratna) when they were nearing their end. What was the point?"

I switch off my recorder. When I had clicked it on at the start of the conversation, he'd pointed out that there were no videos or tape recorders when he was growing up. Now I understand why he sounded wistful. Ah, the garage world's loss is the dance world's gain.