“I turn into another person while I am dancing traditional Indian dance. I feel that I am connected with the culture,” she said, soon after finishing a performance with her Indian dance troupe. “Once, I even felt that I was connected with the gods,” said Yu, 44, a Hong Kong government information officer.

While her passion for Indian culture may seem unusual in this southern Chinese city, where capitalism rules and fashion is dictated by the latest fad, Yu soon found she was not alone. She and Dorothy Chin met in a yoga class several years ago and discovered they shared a passion that was becoming increasingly central to their lives.
Eventually, Chin ditched her job as an investment banker to become a yoga instructor. “There are too many choices in Hong Kong and the pace is so fast that people forget things easily, no one stops and looks around, or thinks and looks inside their hearts,” Chin, 43, said. Yu and Chin last year established Passion India, an organisation which promotes Indian culture through traditional dance and yoga in Hong Kong. They give dance performances and yoga demonstrations at community events across the city, and both have travelled to India to learn more about the culture. During their separate visits to southern Indian cities including Trivandrum, in Kerala, and Chennai in Tamil Nadu, they stayed with local families in an attempt to absorb as much about the daily and spiritual life of the country as they could.