A. Rajendra Kumar, a yoga practitioner, took the locals, tourists and passersby by surprise as he performed ‘Jala yoga’ by floating in the north sea near Pamban rail bridge for 115 minutes on the occasion of International Yoga Day on Sunday.
A postgraduate in Economics, Mr. Kumar from Mandapam entered the sea around 7 a.m. and remained floated, stretching out his hands and holding aloft a white flag in one hand, pressing for world peace.
Running a project centre to help college students prepare their project reports, Mr. Kumar developed interest in yoga and meditation during his schooldays, and started performing some of the toughest yoga postures after reading books and autobiographies of the some of the greatest yoga exponents.
He was impressed by ‘Jala yoga’ and found that meditation was the key to perform it. “I practised for two years and staged the first performance in 2011, also in the north sea in Mandapam, and four more times the next year. This is my sixth performance with the longest duration though the sea was very rough,” he said, adding his previous longest floating was for one hour and five minutes. On the earlier occasions, he held aloft National flags, calling for unity and national integration.
His sixth performance was a low key affair as he had invited only his friend Kanagaraj, a fisherman who had nothing to do with yoga, to inaugurate the show. There were eight tough postures in yoga and this was the first, Mr. Kumar said.
He wanted to achieve the next two levels of ‘walking on the sea’ and performing yoga in deep sea in the ‘padmasana posture’. “I need to go to the next level of meditation to achieve the feats,” he told The Hindu . He was a self-learner of yoga and Swami Vivekananda was his guru, he added.
