Over the years, she has received numerous awards and recognition for her work in the performing arts in India and abroad as a choreographer, scholar and cultural activist.

In 1992 (with a second printed edition in 1997), it started as a phone book with 2000 addresses, when no such data base existed, not even the government had one.

[8][9] A modernist, passionately convinced about creating from her immediate environment, Ratnam has explored various streams of movement and ritual traditions connected with her initial training in classical Bharatanatyam.

[9] All my ideas are from traditional sources, but they can also be from readings and from nature: a lotus flower floating in a small brass vessel, a child blowing soap bubbles, even a piece of paper flying in the wind gives me inspiration.

The whole world of ideas and a host of people and their mannerisms can all be suggested by a flicker of an eyelid, a flourish of the hand and the attitude of the body.

Folk dancers and drummers who dance every evening after a hard day's work in the fields, traditional temple performers whose lives depend upon serving GOD during important festivals, actors who fuse movement with voice culture, young performers and students all over the world who want to learn new movement and the dynamics of cultural memories embedded into our South Asian bloodstream – these are the artistes who are the focus of my work.