Yoga guru Baba Ramdev has announced his entry into politics. He said candidates from his party, named as Bharat Swabhiman, would contest elections for all 543 seats in the next Parliamentary elections.
From The Indian Express: “While vowing to stay away from elections himself, the guru said he would make sure that his proposed political party would have at least seven lakh members in each constituency.
“I have been working for this for the past 20 years. Over the past two years, I have met nearly three crore people in Hardwar, trained and mobilised thousands of people in 60 districts. I want to use black money for the good of the country, ensure that offences like corruption and terrorism get the capital punishment, and turn the political system towards the policy of Swadeshi. This is not a knee-jerk decision,” he said.
The past decade has produced thousands of new foodies and new yogis, all interested in healthier bodies, clearer consciences and a greener planet. Inevitably, the overlap between the people who love to eat and the people who love to do eagle pose has grown. In 2007, a combination yoga studio and fine dining restaurant, Ubuntu, opened in Napa, Calif.
Yoga retreat centers now offer gourmet cooking classes and wine tastings; New York yogis trade tips about which nearby ashrams (Anand) and studios (Jivamukti) serve the best muffins.
But not everyone agrees that the lusty enjoyment of food and wine is compatible with yogic enlightenment. Yoga purists say that many foods — like wine and meat — are still off limits. Others, like Mr. Romanelli, say that anything goes, as long as it tastes good. The debate is exposing rich ores of resentment in the yoga world.
“The culture of judgment in the yoga community — I call it “yogier than thou” — is rampant, and nowhere more than around food,” said Sadie Nardini, a yoga teacher in New York. (“Yogis” are those who do yoga, teachers and students alike.) More:
Haridwar, India: At the crack of dawn, 4,000 people sitting on yoga mats silently watched the renowned guru Baba Ramdev on stage. After his introduction as the one who will dispel the darkness of ignorance, the orange-robed Ramdev chanted “Om” into a microphone. The audience followed with a reverential hum.
“Eat this every morning to prevent cancer,” he said, holding up four holy basil leaves.
“No blood pressure and asthma problem if you do this daily. Be free from medicines!” he exclaimed after performing a few yoga postures and demonstrating six breathing techniques. The crowd cheered. More:
Fed up with foreign companies patenting traditional medicine from India, the country’s top scientific body is compiling a giant database of everything from yoga positions to medicinal fruit juice. An AFP report at Physorg.com:
The initiative has had early success since going public in February, repelling two foreign patent applications in July — one for a skin cream based on melon extract and another for a cancer medicine based on pistachios.
Another 30 cases are being examined worldwide, drawing on the database which aims to prove medical precedents and therefore undercut attempts by companies to patent knowledge that has been passed down over generations in India.
V.K. Gupta, the head of this library, known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), told AFP he hoped the database would provide a cheap and easy system to prevent “wrong patents” based on Indian naturopathy.
“Nobody in the world has a right to take our knowledge, repackage it and claim it as theirs,” said Gupta, who works for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
The TKDL already contains 30 million pages and more than 200,000 medicinal formulas derived from herbal and mineral-based treatments originating in India and abroad, such as ayurveda, unani, siddha, as well as yoga techniques. More:
Little Cumbrae (Scotland): The Scottish island of Little Cumbrae, whose long and chequered history takes in the Vikings, Robert The Bruce of “try, try again” fame and Oliver Cromwell, is witnessing the arrival of three wise men from the East.
From their retreats in Haridwar and Rishikesh high up in the Himalayas, the trinity – Baba Ramdev, Swami Chidanand and Acharya Balkrishna – have come bearing blessings for the Hawan ceremony and bhoomi puja.
This is because Little Cumbrae is being transformed into “a place of pilgrimage” for followers of Patanjali yoga by the island’s new owners, Sarwan and Sunita Poddar, who bought the island for £2 million (Rs 15.2 crore) last month.
As a fast “rib boat” sped across the Firth of Clyde from the marina at Largs on the Ayrshire coast, Ramdev was dressed the part from his saffron shawl and dhoti down to his fashionable saffron trainers. Only the life jacket he and all the others were required to wear was more a shade of red.
The breeze ruffled Swami Chidanand’s long hair, while it emerged that Acharya Balkrishna, who preaches Ayurveda, had visited the island on a previous occasion to advise the Poddars on their purchase. More:
Baba Ramdev attracts thousands of devotees to his open-air yoga sessions, from political powerbrokers and business barons to their drivers and maids. Now he is branching out from his spiritual headquarters on the Ganges to a tiny island in the Firth of Clyde.
This month the superstar swami, one of India’s most charismatic and controversial gurus, will attend a ceremony on Little Cumbrae to mark the start of his new project, the creation of an “international base” for his expanding yogic empire.
Little Cumbrae was bought recently for about £2 million by two Scottish devotees of Baba Ramdev, Sam and Sunita Poddar. The couple, who moved from India 32 years ago and made a fortune running care homes, are renaming it Peace Island. Within 18 months it is hoped that Peace Island will start welcoming pilgrims to retreats, where they will practise strict vegetarianism, stretching routines and circular breathing exercises. More:
Bikram Choudhury loves Bentleys, bling and shopping, making him the true spiritual guru for the consumer age. In the Times:
I have a 10-pack! Still I have a 10-pack!” The Beverly Hills “bad boy” of yoga, Bikram Choudhury, who owns a fleet of 40 Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, and has a global army of acolytes sweating it out to his copyrighted “hot yoga” sequence at temperatures of 40C, is keen to prove he has defied his 63 years. The diminutive mogul leaps up like a coiled spring from the sofa of his luxurious Park Lane suite -- black candyfloss ponytail bouncing beneath a trilby concealing his bald patch -- and yanks up his disco top to reveal a yoga-trim torso and chest stubble (he teaches only in Speedos and a radio mike: perhaps he shaves for aerodynamics).
Sufficiently famous to ditch the surname, Bikram is his very own poster boy. He insists he never gets sick, doesn’t sleep (no, he hasn’t been to bed, having just had “a kind of party”) and doesn’t eat -- well, just a little protein in the late evening. But, then, the Calcutta-born yogiraj may not even be 63. “I don’t say my date of birth,” he smiles enigmatically. But it’s on your website -- 1946. He won’t budge. “I feel 20 years old,” he declares emphatically. Bikram Yoga, now with more than 4,000 studios and rising worldwide, is seen by its legions of devotees as a cure-all. Andy Murray raved about it after taking it up this year -- the toughness helps his mental strength, he says. The Williams sisters practise it, as do all the New York Giants. And Lily Allen. And Madonna. And, erm, Peter Mandelson, who has been on the phone. “He wanted me to make more yoga schools,” Bikram deadpans. “Since he’s been doing my yoga, he write me that his life changed. He feel everything so clear, he could do things much more faster.” Phew. More:
The latest yoga fad: Doggy yoga (aka doga)
“Dogis” sleep better and are more chilled, apparently. Aids available are Om balls and chewable, squeakerless Shanti Sticks (bodhitoys.com). Barking.
Over the decades, the residents of Mysore got used to the sight of westerners dolled up in saris wandering through the streets. Blonde girls in Indian dress were among the thousands of students who flocked to the south Indian city to study Ashtanga yoga with Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois, the man credited for doing much to bring the discipline to the west.
Jois died on May 18, just short of his 94th birthday, in the city where he arrived, aged 14, to beg on its streets and study Sanskrit. Today, Mysore is the site of one of the world’s biggest IT training centres run by computer group Infosys.
India’s transformation over the past century did little to alter Jois’s daily routine. For more than 70 years, he could be found teaching yoga from four in the morning until midday to scores of eager students from across the world. More:
To ward off western pirates, Indian scientists, with government’s support, are scanning through 35 ancient Sanskrit texts to identify and document all known yoga concepts and postures. From The Times of India:
India is going all out to save yoga – a 2,000-year-old art of righteous living, from western pirates. Instances of self-styled yoga gurus claiming copyrights to ancient ‘asanas’, especially from the West, is now becoming rampant. This has made 200 scientists and researchers from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and Union health ministry’s department of Ayush join hands to put on record all known yoga postures and techniques that originated in India.
Scientists are presently scanning through 35 ancient Sanskrit texts, including the Mahabharata, Bhagawad Gita and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali to identify and document all known yoga concepts, postures and terminology.
Indonesia’s top Islamic body the Ulema Council met this past weekend to issue a ban on Muslims from practicing yoga on the ground that it entails Hindu rituals like chanting. But even as the ban kicks up a storm in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, the Darul Uloom Deoband in India intervenes to say that it sees nothing wrong with Muslims doing yoga. Instead of chanting Om (required in some breathing asanas), they can chant verses from the Koran or say the name of Allah. The Indian Express takes a stand.
The Malaysian ulema’s ban on yoga appears to be a bit of a stretch for India’s Islamic establishment, including the Darul Uloom Deoband. It is perfectly acceptable for Muslims to practice the physical discipline while discarding the Hindu associations of words like ‘Om’ — it is even similar to Sufi practices, claimed a scholar.
Are you stressed out? Do you suffer from psoriasis? Think you might be pregnant? Depressed? Overweight? If you answered yes to any (or all) of these questions, perhaps you should try yoga.
Yes, yoga-the consensus cure-all prescribed by experts, neighbors, doctors, online magazines, and strangers the world over. At a time when no one seems to agree on anything, yoga has emerged as a rare counterpoint to globalization’s tarnished image.
In the International Herald Tribune, Kyle Jarrard visits Puducherry (earlier known as Pondicherry) in India:
In the old French quarter of Puducherry.
The first sound in the morning is crows, right at 5. Then we hear waves off the Bay of Bengal slapping the shore. In the garden, a man meditates while walking quickly over the lawn of the ashram guest house in the dark. Along the shore, other men pace the beach in the silver jetty light. Fishing boat lanterns like stars ride the black sea south to north.
My wife and I have come to this old French comptoir (formerly Pondichéry) in southeast India mostly for the yoga. The classes used to be held in one of the many parcels of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram scattered across the colonial city. But for this retreat, there’s a new venue and to get there you have to be on Ajit Sarkar’s bus by 5:45. There are 20 or so of us, nearly all from France.
Ajit, in his 70s now, grew up in this famous ashram with his parents, who went into the retreat founded and inspired by the yogi and guru Sri Aurobindo and his vision of universal consciousness and peace. In this idyllic world, Ajit learned everything from ballet to track to gymnastics, but especially yoga, a skill he has taught with acclaim for decades both in India and in France.
In The Guardian, Randeep Ramesh goes to Haridwar to meet Yoga evangelist Swami Ramdev:
At 5am beneath the Shivalik hills in northern India, Swami Ramdev sits cross-legged swaddled in saffron robes commanding the rapt attention of 500 devotees of his brand of yoga. The crowd is made up mostly of middle-class Indians, many suffering from chronic conditions for which traditional medicine has little to offer but comfort.
Each “patient” has paid 7,000 to 40,000 rupees (£90 to £500) to be among the first to spend a week at the swami’s newest venture: a village of 300 bungalows offering spiritual retreat in the shadow of eucalyptus trees.
Swami Ramdev’s pitch is that pranayama, the ancient Indian art of breath control, can cure a bewildering array of diseases. “Asthma, arthritis, sickle-cell anaemia, kidney problems, thyroid disease, hepatitis, slipped discs – and it will unblock any fallopian tubes,” he tells his audience in the yoga village, who line up to have their blood tested and receive herbal remedies.
In BusinessWeek, a guide to India’s most famous yoga institutes for the serious student of the practice:
Fortunately for the purists, there are several yoga schools run by grand masters who still teach the practice in the time-tested way, steeped in ancient traditions and philosophy. For them, yoga isn’t instant nirvana; indeed, it is mastered only after years of rigorous practice.
Yoga can be adapted for people with health conditions and disabilties, writes Georgiann Caruso in CNN
A middle-aged woman arrives at yoga class, a guide dog beside her wheelchair. She slides onto a mat on the floor and begins warming up with help from the instructor, stretching her knee and leg muscles to the side. Nearby, a man lying on a bench gets an assist from a class helper as he lifts his leg and brings his knee toward his body. Another person, an overweight student, sits and places his feet on brick-like props to enable him to stretch higher.
This is the scene at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where students attend weekly adaptive yoga class. Derived from traditional yoga, poses are modified for those with disabilities or health conditions.
He has been described as the ‘Monk on a Motorcycle’ and is known to play Frisbee and dance at discos. Shekhar Gupta talks to Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, an Indian monk with a wide following, on NDTV 24×7:
Q: So what makes you different? What is it that sets you apart?
“See, I don’t come from any scholarship. I have not read the Vedas or the Upanishads. I just confess I have not read the Gita.”
Q: You ride a motorbike, you wear designer glasses, you drive a Land Rover, and you dance at disco parties. Is it part of your brand image? Or is it to say that you can be normal and spiritual (at the same time)?
“Being spiritual is being normal. If you are not spiritual, you can be handicapped. What you call spiritual is an experience that is beyond the physical.”
Yoga guru Baba Ramdev has announced his entry into politics. He said candidates from his party, named as Bharat Swabhiman, would contest elections for all 543 seats in the next Parliamentary elections.
