Delhi-NCR’s first novel coronavirus patient, 45-year-old Rohit Datta, jokes that the only yoga he did in the pre-pandemic days was kapal bhati, a breathing technique, because someone told him that each expulsion of breath burnt one calorie. “So if I did 300, I’d be burning 300 calories and save time walking,” he says laughing. But when he found himself in hospital with the dreaded COVID-19, taunted by the media for having ‘infected’ others, he grappled with both the physical effects of the infection and the mental anguish of cruel words. “People started sending me all kinds of WhatsApp messages about cures,” he says; they ranged from eating an onion with salt to performing a havan . The only message that got him thinking was one from his mother, who suggested he do anulom-vilom pranayama.
In the isolation unit, Datta made a mental list of five breathing exercises he needed to do: om, anulom-vilom, kapal bhati, bhastrika, and kumbhaka. “The first time I tried, I couldn’t do any for even two seconds. I felt like an old man who had smoked through his life,” he says. But he persisted, doing them twice a day for seven days, gradually increasing the duration. “I didn’t have the strength for physical exercise,” says Datta, who runs a technical textile business in Rajasthan. He had just returned from a work trip to Europe when he was diagnosed positive. Today, a pranayama loyalist, Datta says he will be one for the rest of his life. “It is both preventive and curative,” he says.
The WHO, in its media briefing on March 20, days before India’s lockdown, listed yoga as one of the ways of “making time for exercise”.
In Karnataka, Ashwini Shrinivas G.S. made a YouTube video on her COVID-19 journey, speaking about how yoga and pranayama helped her come through. A Pune couple, who have also recovered from the infection, said it was yoga that kept them engaged in the ward.
Something new
The yoga frenzy that engulfed the world a few years ago has suddenly seen a shift: in these times of COVID-19, it is no longer saffron-tinged and shloka-accompanied; nor is it about ‘celebrating’ the body with white people on Instagram performing the perfect vrschikasana (scorpion pose) on a beach. Today, it is seen as a form of mind-body control in a world where an invisible force bars us from stepping out of our homes.
“The pandemic has given us a different perspective on things we considered important; we’re now asking ourselves, ‘Are they really so important?’ We are looking for answers,” says Anju Dhawan, a professor at the psychiatry department of Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). Some three weeks ago, she started a yoga-pranayam-meditation session over Zoom, which she conducts twice a day for students. She says the reason the class sees this level of engagement — there are 150 in the group — is probably because “some people are interested in stress reduction, and others have opened up to exploring the spiritual realm. Also, maybe this is a time they want to learn something new, have a new experience.”
It’s also a reflection of how the world came to yoga in the first place. It was a way to find a few minutes’ pause in our over-stimulating environments — long commutes, buzzing work schedules, nonstop entertainment. For Lakshmy Vijayan, a second-year student at AIIMS, yoga has helped regulate her sleep-wake cycle. “It also anchors you to the present,” she says.
Finding answers
In the second week of March, when the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the number of COVID-19 cases outside China had increased 13-fold and the number of countries affected had tripled, the Harvard Medical School’s health blog published an article titled ‘Coping with coronavirus anxiety’. The writer, John Sharp, suggested yoga, meditation, and breathing as three distinct ways of relaxing. He even offered names of apps such as Yoga Studio and Pocket Yoga, Headspace and Calm, ironically all owned and developed in the West.
Today, yoga is seen as a form of mind-body control in a world where an invisible force bars us from stepping out of our homes.
The West has studied yoga and found that it boosts flexibility and strength, and in some cases aerobic power too. Its attention to syncing breath with movement and its focus on different breathing exercises helps both physically and mentally, improving lung capacity and helping calm the mind, all of which make it almost prescription-worthy for COVID-19 times.
The WHO, in its media briefing on March 20, days before India’s lockdown, listed yoga as one of the ways of “making time for exercise”.
Soon the floodgates opened; Google recorded a surge in searches. For instance, on April 27, at 4.20 p.m., searches for clothing brand ‘Alo Yoga’ spiked 4,150% in the U.S. over a 30-day period compared to the previous 30 days. Searches for ‘yoga poses for kids’ went up by 3,650% in India, ‘sun salutation’ in the U.K. shot up by over 5,000% — this jump in numbers made it what Google Trends calls a ‘breakout’. The biggest traffic in India came from Sikkim, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Uttarakhand.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for whom yoga has been a top soft-power subject, tweeted that he practises yoga nidra whenever he gets the time.
Sister Infant Tresa who runs Nirmala Yoga Centre in Muvattupuzha, Kerala, has been practising yoga for almost 35 years. Last year, the Kerala Catholic Bishops Council approved of this wellness tool as the practice had secular origins.
Whether the popularity of yoga nidra stems from this is anyone’s guess, but on the Cure.fit app, this, along with pranayama classes, is among the two most popular yoga sessions. In fact, yoga is the highest rated among all their online classes. Naresh Krishnaswamy, who heads growth and business at Cure.fit, says that both yoga and other workout formats are growing at a 5x rate. “It wasn’t a surprise — yoga is a big market,” he says. Alistair Shearer in his book, The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West, talks of it being a “$25 billion-a-year wellness industry”.
Business of yoga
And as it goes online in the time of lockdown, the business is bound to only grow.
Abhishek Sharma, who calls himself a holistic fitness coach, decided to do a Facebook Live every morning during lockdown from his Mumbai home. A trainer to celebrities, including Dia Mirza and Rajkumar Hirani, he started conducting classes at 8:30 a.m., only to find that people were engaging with him even after the sessions and reaching out to him from Nepal, Pakistan and Singapore.
“I realised there’s a lot of anxiety, even though people were putting on a brave face,” he says. “I have been anti-online. I’m very old-school,” he adds. Sharma, who learnt raj yoga, considered the highest form of yoga that focuses on the inner self and its oneness with the universe, adapted to the urban needs of yoga for weight-loss, back problems or as a balm for stress. He now focuses on helping people make yoga part of their daily lives. He sees his classes as a comfort zone for people, where they feel like they are in touch with regular life. “A lot of people are bingeing on Netflix and food, so just waking up and attending a morning session puts the day in some order,” he says.
Sarvesh Shashi, founder, SARVA and Diva Yoga, Mumbai, a chain of yoga studios, says that on the SARVA app, 63% of the high intensity yoga is consumed by women, whereas the guided meditation has a 55% male audience. “In yoga terms, women are moving from asana to dhyana, and men are moving from dhyana to asana,” he says, noting the difference in entry point to the practice. Both he and Sharma talk of the immunity that yoga offers, something particularly relevant for the time. In fact, SARVA even has a sequence for this.
The West has studied yoga and found that it boosts flexibility and strength, and in some cases aerobic power too.
But is the new focus on yoga, with its online avatar, going to turn into something entirely commercial? “Purchasing health virtually is going to become the norm,” says Vijay Raaghavan, Director, Management Consulting, PwC India, who works on digital health and wellness. “We used to seek management of illness. Going froward, people will become cautious about how to manage health.” He says offers will now be linked to points that ‘buy’ you more than just products. For instance, if you sign up for a yoga class, it may be linked with a health insurance policy, but may also be linked with an intangible benefit like gaining access to an international flight that has stricter health norms, for instance. It is the sense of having access to ‘privileges’ that yoga may boom on.
Much like the LinkedIn Social Selling Index which measures the user’s profile and engagement across five parameters, Dr. Raaghavan thinks that if a company can draw up an index that fixes parameters for yoga engagement (such as yoga clothes, footwear, food, level of skill), it may be able to take yoga to the next level of commerce. “Instant gratification, say completing an hour-long session, gets you cumulative worth — your breathing gets better — which also leads you to a certain entitlement, say, being able to join a club run by a yoga clothing brand. This is the future of yoga.”
