One day, when I'm old and crossing the street, someone will stop and say, ‘That's Baba.' That will be enough.
Five hundred years ago, enslaved Africans in Brazil found a language of freedom in disguise. They masked their defiance as dance, their resistance as rhythm. In the cadence of drums and the grace of motion, they reclaimed what had been taken from them — the right to move freely, to live with dignity, to fight without hatred.
This language came to be known as Capoeira: part martial art, part music, part theatre of survival.
Centuries later, that same rhythm crossed oceans and found another unlikely custodian — a man who, without quite meaning to, would bring Capoeira to India and give it a new home.
Reza Massah, "Baba" as he is known to the thousands of students who have learned to balance, fall, and rise with him, did not set out to blaze a trail. But he was destined to build one nonetheless. A trail that took him from the quiet isolation of a boarding school to airports and kitchens, right back to schools where children and parents and teachers alike are convinced, he's the Pied Piper come to life. His life has been a literal study in motion.
origins in motion
Reza's story begins at five. He remembers the journey vividly — the plane ride from Iran to India, the promise of a new language, the certainty that he would return home once he learned it. "I thought I'd learn English in a day and come back," he laughs. "I didn't know I'd be staying for years."
The boarding school he was sent to was a world without familiar words. Loneliness became his first teacher, and movement his first form of expression. "If I sat still, I would start to think, and it would make me very sad," he says. "So I ran, boxed, swam, did gymnastics, anything that kept me moving." Sports became a sanctuary. His pocket money was spent not on treats or books but on sports gear. "I didn't know what I was preparing for," he says. "I just knew that when I moved, I felt free."
At fifteen, he was already in the gym, drawn to the culture of discipline and strength. "All the Iranis in Hyderabad were bodybuilders," he recalls. "We grew up in the Rambo years. Muscles were how you showed you belonged." But even then, there was something different in the way he approached it. For him, strength was not vanity, but defiance. “I've never seen my parents exercise," he says. "So maybe that was my rebellion, to move when no one else did."
a restless apprenticeship
The years that followed read like a manual in improvisation. At sixteen, Reza's father handed him a driver's licence and little else. "He said, 'This is all I can give you. Start your life.'”
So he did. Bellboy. Driver. Line cook. Valet. He worked nights to pay for flying lessons in Australia, chopping vegetables by the hour and dreaming of the clouds. He earned his pilot's licence and realised, too late, that the sky could feel smaller than it looked. "You're sitting there eight hours staring at blue," he says. "It's calm, but it's not alive."
The dream shifted. From air to earth, from flight to flavour. He opened cafés and food stalls — crepes, coffee, ice cream, handmade smoothies — a kind of kinetic entrepreneurship that echoed the energy he carried since childhood. "Food is movement too," he says. "You stand, you stir, you serve, you connect." It was during these years that another rhythm entered his life, this time through sound.
the day movement found meaning
It was during his years in Israel, where he ran cafés serving crepes and coffee, that he first heard the rhythm that would change his life. One day, he followed the sound of drums into an academy across from his café. Inside, three concentric circles of people clapped, sang, and moved in kinetic abandon, their faces lit up with fierce joy. The air was thick with sweat, the mirrors fogged with breath. "I remember thinking — who put music into yoga?"
It was his first encounter with capoeira.
Within days, he began training with the group next door, paying for classes not with money but with coffee and crepes from his café. "It was fair trade — their movement for my food," he smiles. "And it's how my real education began." He discovered that in capoeira, discipline and freedom could coexist and that rhythm, community, and courage could transform the body into a story.
When he returned to India in 2005, he carried with him no business plan, only instruments, conviction, and a few recordings. He began teaching in open parks and under apartment buildings. Sometimes his bike refused to start; sometimes his classes were empty. But he never missed a day. "Even when there were three students," he says, "I felt like I was creating something new."
By the time Capoeira India found its first home in Bandra, word had spread. Music, movement, and laughter filled the old bungalow that he and Aparna, his partner and collaborator in work and life, rented. It was a space with no air-conditioning, no mirrors, not even a proper bathroom, but energy that refused to be contained. MTV and Channel V called him the "crazy cool" teacher who moved like music. The real transformation, however, began when the children found their Baba.
"What was hard for adults came so naturally to kids," he says. "They don't question their bodies. They just move." The classes grew. Parents came to watch. One of them, a famous filmmaker, wrote an article about how Baba taught — not just capoeira, but curiosity.
Soon, word travelled to schools. The first to open its doors was Billabong International. Out of three hundred students, two hundred and seventy-five chose capoeira over football or theatre. "That's when I realised this was bigger than fitness," he says. "It was a language of confidence."
Baba's teaching style blurred the boundaries between sport and art. His students learned to flip and sing, to listen and lead, to trust their own timing. "Every ten minutes, something changes," he explains. "There's rhythm, reaction, play, acrobatics. It's never static."
rhythm nation
The experiment soon became a movement across Mumbai's schools and studios. Aparna joined him full-time to grow the company while he focused on moving people. By 2010, Capoeira India was running multiple centres and workshops. But growth never changed Baba's core conviction — that movement could be a form of healing.
movement as medicine
"In a country where so many children grow up afraid — afraid to speak, afraid to fail, afraid to fall — movement is medicine," he says. "It teaches control without aggression, strength without violence." He calls capoeira "the missing link": a way to make confidence physical, to teach safety through rhythm rather than fear.
Parents noticed the difference. Doctors and teachers wrote to him describing how the children who trained with him became calmer, sharper, and more focused. "One parent told me," he recalls, "'Your one-hour class gives the same release as a four-hour trek.’ That's when I knew this was real."
Through the years, the circle kept widening. Former students became instructors; schools added capoeira to their curriculum; and Baba — always in motion — became mentor to a generation. His classes remained hands-on and human. He still rode a scooter to class, carrying his berimbau and a small music player. "Some days the rain would soak everything — my CDs, my clothes, my bike — but it never felt like hardship," he says. "It felt like purpose."
axé Baba
Now in his fifties, Baba still teaches nine classes a day. His students are children, professionals, actors, and athletes — people who may never meet in any other setting. "Capoeira equalises," he says. "Everyone learns to fall and to get back up. Everyone learns to listen."
He is still building, still dreaming. His next goal is an academy — a space that brings together masters worldwide, where children can train, learn, and lead. "If we can put a capoeirista in every home," he smiles, "we can build a generation that knows how to move in every sense of the word."
Ask him what legacy means, and he pauses. "My legacy is people," he says. "The students who found their voice, the teachers who built their confidence, the ones who stayed when it was hard. I'm just planting seeds. One day, when I'm old and crossing the street, someone will stop and say, ‘That's Baba.' That will be enough."
He calls capoeira an unfinished journey — a rhythm that keeps evolving, a movement that mirrors life. "Every new curve, every new challenge," he says, "is just another rhythm."
For him, movement is the language that taught him resilience and showed him he belonged. In teaching others to move, Reza "Baba" Massah has built something that stands still only long enough to inspire the next step forward.