Still Nagendra had no desire to be a religious quack. When he established Prashanti Kuteeram, the sprawling campus of the university in the early 1980s, about a two-hour drive from Bangalore, he was very clear about his goal. “Then as now, my goal is to make yoga relevant to today’s world.”
Yoga has become a global juggernaut, attracting everyone from supermodels to super-yogis who seek their share of the pie. Christy Turlington, who once walked the ramp, now makes a living through yoga. Her line of yoga products includes mats, clothes and even a skincare line named Sundari based on Ayurveda. Other gurus have branched off into their own version of yoga, ranging from the new-age but chic Jivamukhti Yoga Centre in downtown Manhattan to the sweat-inducing Bikram Yoga to aerobic Power Yoga to Baba Ramdev’s yoga.
A recent trend is Christian yoga, which seeks to subsume the physical benefits of yoga into the religious umbrella of Christianity. Purists argue that yoga’s popularity has taken it further and further away from the ancient truths that were its foundation.
Nagendra is both purist and not. On the one hand, he studied Sanskrit for five years just so he could read Patanjali and other Vedic texts in their original form. When asked what his favorite text is, he says, “The Upanishads… for their wisdom.” Yet, he is remarkably tolerant with respect to how people adapt yoga to suit their lives. “He is a visionary,” says Shamanthakamani Narendran, a pediatrician who also has a PhD in yoga sciences from Bangalore University. “He has got this vision that yoga is the science of the future and he is working hard to make that happen.”
Right from the beginning, Nagendra viewed yoga as a “tool” that people could use to cope with the stresses of modern life. Rather than simply pay lip service to this idea, he sought to establish yoga’s benefits through rigorous controlled scientific trials.
Asthma, for instance, is one area that his institution has had particular success with partly because of its location. Bangalore’s high altitude and high levels of pollen through the Parthenium weed have made its citizens prone to allergies and asthma. At Prashanti Kuteeram, asthmatics are taught breathing techniques (pranayama), meditation and yoga asanas. They are monitored against a control group, which doesn’t practice yoga, and the results analyzed. Over the years, says Nagendra, tens of thousands of people have been subjected to such clinical trials and through them the clear benefits of yoga in the control of asthma has been established.
Svyasa (www.svyasa.org) publishes papers about this in scientific journals. It has also developed modules that can help the average person cope with an asthma attack without nebulizers, inhalers and medication.
Another module that Svyasa has developed with great success is to use yoga to reduce stress among executives. Busy corporate executives require two things from any project they undertake: they want to see results in the shortest time possible, says Nagendra with a rueful smile. To that end, his university has developed weekend workshops which teach relaxation and concentration techniques in simple user-friendly modules.