A few years ago, after yoga became a public spectacle of important but unfit men performing what they claimed were asanas, a minister went into shavasana, or the ‘corpse pose,’ and dozed off. He had to be woken up. Not that the poses they were doing before that were more strenuous.
When India says ‘yoga,’ its bar is very low. It means mild stretches and breathing exercises. People trying to touch their toes, impeded by paunches, or sitting in lotus position, inhaling, exhaling and looking as though they are doing something philosophical. And this is what India and some of its regional governments are trying to promote in government offices and schools in the name of yoga.
Many fear they are being coerced into yoga. And they find it hard to resist what appears to be a well-meaning physical activity with a spiritual air.
The fact is, deep breaths and stretches are almost useless on their own and highly overrated as exercise unless you are a centenarian. If one is not doing any other form of workout, like cardio or weight training, then government-sponsored yoga lite should not be deemed an exercise. Walking is superior.
People who are not physically active love yoga lite precisely because it is not exercise but officially proclaimed as such. That could mislead people. Scholars differ on how strenuous daily exercise must be to be meaningful, but broadly there is no dispute that it has to be strenuous.
An exercise is physical activity that increases and decreases the heart rate either erratically or systematically. Or stretches and contracts muscles vigorously, resulting in a million micro tears for the body to repair, one of the processes by which they become stronger. Or stretches muscles gently to make them more durable. The yoga lite events of India do none of this, not even stretch muscles in meaningful ways.
Once, the people who were seen in public doing yoga were its great masters. Today their ambassadors look like they have back aches. Yet, not only do they claim they are exercising, but also that sitting still and breathing deeply is some feat.
Yoga is, in reality, a vast ocean of strenuous exercises. But what the government has started glorifying are its gateways processes. It’s like glorifying warm-up before the run and claiming that it amounts to running.
Most Indians who speak of the glory of yoga can barely bend. North India is filled with men whose attempt at touching the feet of the elderly is comical. It is not odd at all that people who are not fit are the most passionate about breathing exercises.
This is also why, during the covid lockdown, those who hailed the government’s strictures against stirring out, even for a walk, were probably also the most unfit. They would send security guards after me when I would go for a run within the housing colony.
The unhealthy were quick converts to draconian covid rules because it was the first time that what came naturally to them, doing nothing, was also the mainstream health advice. They may have presumed that to sit at home in lotus position and breathe slowly before having samosas was healthier than jogging outside.
It is the same human nature that makes the inactive bloviate that there is some deep wisdom in breathing and stretching alone. The loud and farcical link that Indians make between yoga and Indianness seems part of the same psyche. The less people do, the more they talk.
We don’t know how popular yoga was in ancient India or whether it was only a preserve of a few, but what we do know is that by the 20th century, Indians had all but abandoned it, especially its vast array of strenuous exercise. B.K.S. Iyengar, who resurrected yoga in the modern world, says so in his memoirs. Not just that, yoga was restricted to upper caste men.
When Iyengar began to teach it, Indians were not interested. He found foreigners the most receptive. And he faced ostracism by how own community for teaching them yoga, with women included.
Yoga regained its popularity in India after the West endorsed it. In any case, there’s a big difference between what Iyengar calls yoga, which is a fabulous set of exercises, and the farce on display. People tend to overvalue what comes easily to them and ridicule what they cannot bear to do.
In Fredrik Backman’s novel, A Man Called Ove, an old man wonders what is the point of middle-aged men running so slowly: “What he can’t understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. With those smug smiles on their faces, as if they were out there curing pulmonary emphysema. Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers do.
It’s a forty-year-old man’s way of telling the world that he can’t do anything right. Is it really necessary to dress up as a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast in order to be able to do it?”
But then, even slow running (the only definition of running is an act where both feet are not on the ground at the same instant), is usually a high-intensity workout that may just prevent pulmonary emphysema. I cannot, in good conscience, defend small shorts worn by grown men though.
Like the slow running of middle-aged men, yoga too is defamed by people who don’t like the sort of people who practise it. Heptologist Cyriac Abby Philips, known as Liverdoctor on Twitter, called yoga useless. He is probably annoyed by the ambassadors of yoga more than yog. Even controlled breathing and stretches are not entirely pointless. All I say is that their glorification has created the false notion that they are sufficient exercises, which they are not.
The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’