On International Yoga Day, observed last Sunday, I found myself, early in the morning, on top of a mountain overlooking the town of Rishikesh, nestled along the banks of the Ganges. I wasn’t alone; there were about half-a-dozen other people, all of us attempting spinal twists under the guidance of a young yoga teacher. I could feel my visceral fat melting — and along with that, ego.
I have been familiar with several yoga postures since my childhood, thanks to Dhirendra Brahmachari, Indira Gandhi’s yoga teacher, who had a weekly programme on Doordarshan in the late 1970s (strangely, no one today recalls his contribution to the promotion of yoga in middle-class India). But I began practising only in 2003, when Swami Ramdev was already goading the lay Indian into performing pranayama, morning after morning.
Ramdev, unlike Dhirendra Brahmachari, managed to awaken the nation to the benefits of yoga, because by 2003, unlike in the 1970s, every other 40-plus Indian was fighting diabetes and/or hypertension and looked at him as their saviour.
My interest in yoga, however, had nothing to do with Ramdev’s discourses. I enrolled with a yoga studio, located in an upscale neighbourhood of Chennai, merely because I was taken in by its advertisement in the papers. I was eager to lose weight, and was curious to see how yoga could help me get a sculpted body — something the advertisement promised.
I lost weight rapidly. In hindsight, you cannot not lose weight if you are made to do 20 rounds of sun salutation a day. But within months I realised that at the studio, I was merely doing yoga and not learning yoga — it was like following the commands of an aerobics instructor. And so, to deepen my practice, I went to the Sivananda Ashram at Neyyar Dam, near Trivandrum; and a couple of years later, switched over to the more-challenging Mysore style of yoga. In the meantime, I also bought expensive books and DVDs and became a regular reader of yogajournal.com. I began to consider myself an expert on the subject of yoga — not to mention the pride that overcame me each time I effortlessly got into the crane pose or shoulder-stand or headstand.
Then came a time when I would not practise for months together, smug that I knew my yoga and could get back to it anytime. Sometimes, the months would stretch to a year. Occasionally, to assure myself that I was still in form, I would get into the wheel pose or perform a headstand, and feel pleased.
Reality punched me in the face on International Yoga Day, when I was on that mountain overlooking Rishikesh. The teacher — a simple, sincere man — put us through simple exercises: leg raises, seated forward bends, spinal twists. I felt like a first-timer in a yoga class, finding it difficult to achieve poses that I thought would be child’s play.
As I struggled, some lessons dawned on me: 1. Difficult poses are rather easy to achieve, whereas simple-looking poses are almost impossible to perfect (try doing a perfect triangle, or the trikonasana); 2. Knowledge of yoga is as good as garbage unless you force yourself onto the yoga mat every single morning; 3. There is always someone who knows better than you — in this case the teacher — and you must surrender to him; nothing can be more uplifting than total surrender.
I suddenly felt like a toddler who was learning to walk, all over again. I felt wiser and lighter. The best part is that I shall always remember the day my ego melted, because it happened to be International Yoga Day.
