The daughter of well-known Greek singer Vassos Seitanidis and popular theatre and cinema actress Smaro Stefanidou, Leda-Irene was born in Athens, Greece, where she started dance lessons at the age of 6 and went on studying ballet and modern dance with Hero Sismani and Nassouka Himara. As a child, theatre was her favourite game, but her relationship with it was ambivalent, as this magical world was what was taking her parents away from her every evening. Her uncle (mother’s brother) was one of the first members of the Greek Theosophical Society, the translator of Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata as well as many other Indian books. On Sundays, when she visited her grandmother’s house in Halandri, she listened, enraptured, to his musings, thoughts and stories, the seed of her particular relationship to India. “It is very strange now that I think about it, but since I was little, whenever I happened to listen to Indian music I burst into tears!”When she was twelve, her father died. It was a terrible shock, from which it took years to recover. She stopped her dance lessons, she stopped everything. She didn’t feel like doing anything. It was then that she started questioning things and looking for answers to important problems: where do we come from, where are we going to, what is life and what is death, what is it to be human….“I was trying to heal my grief and my questions through books I took from my uncle. I was discussing with him about the roots of various religions, and I started reading about philosophy, both Western and Indian. My father’s death was so devastating to me, and those conversations were a relief. Until the age of 17, I delved into philosophy a lot”.