"You can bump and grind/cause it's good for your mind."

No one embodies this line from Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann's ode to the Indian song-and-dance spectacle, better than Farah Khan. She is every New Wave director's favourite choreographer, Karan Johar's pink-pant wearing, sequinned-bag carrying buddy and director of the work-in-progress Main Hoon Na. She is also unlike most Bollywood choreographers, who tend to be like Cinderella's stepsisters at the ball-invited but ignored.

STRIKE A POSE: For Farah, dancing is a part of life

But when Hollywood's latest sweetheart Reese Witherspoon matches steps with her during the filming in England of Mira Nair's period epic Vanity Fair, it really will be the revenge of the wallflower, with Farah calling the shots during a three-minute ballroom dance sequence with a Moroccan theme.

It is not something she is losing sleep over. After all, she has become quite used to big ticket productions. For Monsoon Wedding, Nair gave her five hours for the Neha Dubey wedding song. For the West End production of Bombay Dreams, she spent eight weeks rehearsing with dancers. For Vanity Fair, she will take a week.

Mumbai films, in all their broadness, madness and craziness, course through the 37-year-old Farah's veins. Her pedigree is impeccable. Her father Kamran made B-grade Dara Singh thrillers, her mother Menaka is the elder sister of scriptwriter-director Honey Irani and her brother is comedian Sajid Khan. On the sets of Dil Chahta Hai, she would often sit in the lap of its director Farhan Akhtar, who is her cousin. "All my dancers thought we were having an affair," she chortles. "The dogs, I told them he is my brother."

DANCE SEQUENCE: If Chhaiya chhaiya set Farah's international career rolling, Roshan's moves in Kaho Na ... (centre) and Dubey's in Monsoon Wedding got millions of people to their feet

Apart from her talent ("If we knew she was so keen on dancing, we would have made sure she underwent classical training," says Irani), Farah's greatest ability is that of making and keeping friends. It is enough to make even Shah Rukh Khan wake up at 8 a.m. on the Darjeeling shoot of Main Hoon Na. "I had to press his feet and rub his head. Poor thing, his feet ache when it is cold." And in January, when she shot with Shah Rukh, Zayed Khan, Sushmita Sen, Amrita Rao and 100 dancers, it was very cold.

But then Farah always gets what she wants. She was determined to shoot her first film, which needs a campus background, on the same location as Raj Kapoor's Mera Naam Joker. "I asked Randhir Kapoor and he told me it was the St Paul's School in Darjeeling. Once I saw pictures of it on the Internet, I fell in love with it." It was such a wonderful experience, she says, that even hardened make-up men had tears streaming down their faces when they left. Johar, one of her closest friends since the days he was the fat boy on the sets of Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, is sure her film will be as mad, fun and sensitive as she is. "Yeah," sniffs Farah, "he is always stealing my camera angles for his scenes." It is clearly an in joke with them because Johar, with whom she has done 15 songs, dismisses that: "Her ability to understand a song and make it part of the narrative is unrivalled."

For Farah, dancing is a part of life. Irani recalls her as a child, forever breakdancing-her tribute to Michael Jackson was written all over Hrithik Roshan's moves in Kaho Na ... Pyaar Hai. Beginning with a troupe that performed at fashion shows and New Year events, Farah reached a dead-end after four years ("Remember, there were no music videos then") until she decided to reinvent herself by becoming Mansoor Khan's assistant in Joh Jeeta Wohi Sikandar in 1989. Choreographer Saroj Khan, then the reigning queen of jhatka-matka, walked off the set, never to return. "Mansoor told me, 'This is your big moment'," she recalls. Pehla nasha was born, and so was a far more subtle style of dancing.

For Farah, the turning point came during Virasat, Priyadarshan's rustic designer film, where she choreographed the robust Dhol bajne laga. "For the first time, I was included in Bollywood's establishment. Till then, everyone thought I could do only western songs," says the St Xavier's College dropout. This meant she could charge upwards of Rs 1 lakh for every song she choreographed.

For over a decade now, Farah has worked with practically every bright, young Generation Next director. But it was Chhaiya chhaiya in Mani Ratnam's Dil Se that really set her international career in motion. And as with some of the best moves in her career, it was unscripted. "We couldn't have rehearsals because we didn't have a train," she says. But this life-long student of cinema has an eye refined by experience and study. "Shah Rukh has just given me a book on Sydney Lumet, Making Movies. Its first sentence is my motto: Being a director is the best job in the world."

Which is why she has not done too many movies. "The ones I did for money stand out as rubbish," she says. As she clowns with friends, former students and now independent choreographers, Gita Kapur and Feroz, in her sea-facing apartment in Mumbai's film suburb, it is clear that she loves her work as much as those she shares it with. She encourages them to do work she cannot (Kapur did the songs in Armaan that Farah couldn't). They reward her with unquestioning loyalty. Says Kapur, who calls her Mama: "She has never bound us to her. Yet she is always there when we turn to her for advice." A reason why when Farah goes to Broadway with Bombay Dreams next year ("We're reworking some of the British humour for the American audience," she says) or with the stage version of Monsoon Wedding after that, Kapur will follow. Bumping and grinding, along the way.