Karnataka: The man clad in a white dhoti and shirt is unprepossessing as he walks towards the stage. The audience in the vast auditorium barely notices him as he walks barefoot and ascends to the podium. Then he begins talking. In fluent engineer’s English mixed with choice Sanskrit words, the man explains esoteric concepts from the Vedas: he talks about spirituality, karma yoga, about being detached and experiencing the silence within. “Anandamaya kosha,” he calls it and it is blissful, he says.
The fidgeting audience—primarily students from India and abroad—sits up and takes notice. Something in the man’s confident tone and the seeming ease with which he makes abstract concepts accessible is compelling. “He sounds like he knows what he is talking about,” says one dreadlocked student from Germany sitting amid a group of young Japanese women clad in salwar-kameezes.
Religion is a touchy subject in India. The continent is home to most of the world’s great religions, yet veers from religious tolerance to intolerance with every swing of the pendulum. For every Gandhi, there is a Godhra; for every Abdul Kalam there is a Abdul Wahid Kashmiri; for every secular Hindu, there is an RSS fundamentalist. To focus on India’s spiritual heritage without getting enmeshed in its religious skin is a tough balancing act but the man on stage does it deftly.
Finally, a monk clad in orange robes introduces the man. He is H.R. Nagendra, vice-chancellor of Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (Svyasa) University.
In spite of its long unwieldy name, this university is engaged in cutting-edge research on yoga and how it affects the human body. In collaboration with Johns Hopkins, Harvard Medical School and other top institutions, Svyasa is engaged in clinical trials on how yoga can be used to deal with modern-day ailments such as asthma, allergies, cholesterol, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Svyasa offers masters and PhD degrees which link yoga to the physical sciences, management studies, life sciences, humanities and yes, spirituality. This marriage of science and yoga makes sense, given Nagendra’s background. After getting his ME and PhD in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, he worked at the University of British Columbia, Nasa Marshall Space Flight Centre and the Harvard University Engineering Sciences Laboratory where he was consultant for three years before returning to India via Imperial College, London.
Even though he is steeped in science and thinks with the dispassionate rigour of an engineer, Nagendra says he was always attracted to mysticism.
“It seemed to me that every scientist I admired—ranging from Einstein to Newton—turned to mysticism later in life,” he said. “There are many things that science cannot explain.”