Yoga has given India a stunning international shimmer. The ethos, values and practices of a long ago past, of a far away country, seem to have been directly, successfully embedded in the minds and bodies of millions in a manner in which even IT and Bollywood—put together—haven’t, can’t. There isn’t a city without its local yoga guru dispensing his/her wisdom. Cities like Mysore and Poona resemble mini Olympics Games villages every day of the year.
The biggest magnets, of course, are B.K.S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois, but there are dozens more gurus, aspiring and perspiring, straining every sinew to keep the turnstiles swinging. But is yoga as a cottage industry, if not here elsewhere, in danger of being commodified and reduced to a pale shadow of its original intent noble and purpose?
Yoga mat, yoga mat-carrier, yoga-speak, hot yoga, yoga tapes, yoga books… a kind of supermarket yoga that is just another word for burning fat? The Bikram Choudhury intellectual property rights scandal in the United States has been much documented. Baba Ramdev‘s USP has become rowasana, in which he wriggles out of a controversy a day.
Now, on Slate, Ron Rosenbaum twists the knife further.
“[What] once was—and still can be—pure and purifying has been larded with mystical schlock. Once a counterweight to our sweaty striving for ego gratification, yoga has become an unctuous adjunct to it.”
Read the full article here: The hostile new age takeover of yoga
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How can yoga be prevented from being completely overrun by the marauders? Should it?
25 March 2007 at 12:21 pm
There’s nothing that can be done. Once the Americans adopt something, it is as good as lost. I have an Italian friend who fumes about pizza. While yoga and pizza are not the same, you get the picture.
Time magazine once ran a cover on Yoga without India being mentioned even once. The entire thrust of it was how it burnt fat and gave the practitioner the very sought after “yoga butt”, not the spiritual aspects of the practice.
25 March 2007 at 1:09 pm
True, a bit of Yoga, some aerobic exercises, some heavy talk does seem to make people Yoga gurus. But then, there are Yoga Universities which do not want to advertise but all the same draw students from all over the world. I am one of those who will swear by Yoga for better health, mind and body. It made me a complete human being. From being a vegetable, a complete stone,paralysed from neck down, I have become a person who is doing usefull work, move around, etc. I think people want to say negative things about everything and Yoga, is also one such thing.
25 March 2007 at 1:34 pm
With due respects to some really great teachers, yoga is like aphrodisiac for vast majority who have lost their way and want to get back and after brief stint of yoga look dazed for a few months with glazed plastic smile smiling at everybody as though they are nearer to Nirvana. It does the works much like Alcholic Anonymous and after a few months revert to their earlier life. A few who get on high become another yoga teacher and mint money. The charde goes on.
11 August 2010 at 8:34 pm
yoga like any other thing that is liked will put someone in the zone. i feel yoga is no more then stretching but some feel to make it way more then that. i like yoga for keeping my body fit although i have hurt myself badly doing it. there will always be nuts and freaks who overdo anything and the same fate has fallen to this.