Why the fear of Yoga?

←This Tweet set me wondering.

I did some researching. Sure, there are many varieties of Yoga out there.
Hot Yoga students do Yoga in hot humid conditions. If you don’t care for that, there’s Beer Yoga which is done while drinking cold beer. There are other kinds, too tiresome to list here or to bother with.
It is clear these have mushroomed, triggered by the vogue word that Yoga has become. This happened to Dosa too, when it became a global darling. There are tens of varieties being invented to excite and attract the bored classes. We best leave this Yoga marketplace to the idle class to study the more curious struggles that Yoga has triggered.
There are now Muslim Yoga and Christian Yoga. The latter is of a lesser interest because Christians, at least in the West, have mostly broken free of any fear of disobedience to a judgmental god. In fact, some of the finest teachers of classical Yoga are to be found among them, having been students under traditional Indian Masters. The question of how the clergy deals with Indian Christians is another matter and I shall return to it later.

A windmill is my Murti

[The following article has been republished by IndiaFacts.org]

I have heard it said that if you truly seek an answer to a spiritual question, you’ll invariably come by a Guru’s wisdom. 
This is my story of such a discovery.
For forty of my 75 years, my work has had something or the other to do with the earth, plants and water. I have spent most of that time with rural people who work with their hands. 

Almost daily, I was witness to their Hinduism in actual practice- spontaneously, consistently and without question. Things were done instinctively.

A workman would touch the soil before starting work. They  would start the day after seeking to be blessed by their work tools, be it a trowel, a mattock or a saw. Many would take the first fistful of food to their bowed head before eating. Work on a area was always begun at the North East corner. A peepul tree was never to be cut. Most knew when it was likely to rain, what crop suited the time, when the moon began to wax and when to wane. It was best to sow seeds at amavasya and soon after. Steps in a stairs and pillars in a verandah had to be odd numbered. Most everyone knew basic arrangement of living spaces in a house. And of course, plenty of agreement on what was good to eat, for whom and when.

These and more, I could narrate here but that’s not the point of this article.

What struck me was a great rootedness in the very soil and a connectedness with the space around us. “Religion’ was not something apart that  you go somewhere to practice. It emerged in everything they did. Every practice seemed to be based on a great conviction.

No verse from any book gave them instructions. Their response seemed driven by an unspoken fundamental belief. 

What was it?

How to spot a Leftitute

In 1946, Gerald Celente a business consultant in USA, felt impelled to coin the word ’presstitute’. It’s a portmanteau of two rather obvious words. The word remained little used until social media grew in strength, and the word was rediscovered as a very valuable one indeed. It is so handy to call out all the various shades of humbugs in mainstream media.
A group of friends recently discussed the need to coin a word or phrase that is an alternate to the 'Right Wing' label that is thrust on them. No suggestion came up that lit everyone’s eyes. And there the matter ended.

Later this struck me.  Why not just embrace being called Right and invent a word to define the opposing motley crew that comes in many shades? They get called secular, libtard, pseudo-secular, liberal, lib-sec, leftist, regressive left, anti-national  etc. But being the artful dodgers they are, they evade being uniquely branded and get away looking good.

All religions have terrorists, did you say?

It’s a technique well-known to novelists: Decide the end and write towards it. Let’s follow a practitioner at work.
Say, the desired outcome is to have the world believe Hindu-terrorism stalks the land, he starts by tossing out sentences like these: Terror has no religion, All religions have extremists, We must condemn all forms of terrorism etc. By implication there are terrorists among Jains, Buddhists,Parsis, Sikhs and of course Hindus. You don’t even react because for you they are tired cliches.
He then bides his time till something develops in this vast country that is of promise for furthering his plot. Along come cow vigilantes. He takes this kernel of truth -namely, scattered instances of cow vigilantism- and scales it up till cow-goons are deemed Hindu-terrorists.
What he has created is a neatly packaged narrative capital, to be saved for deployment at a needy moment. Just such a need arises when Amarnath pilgrims are killed by terrorists.

Not In My Name, says the cow to Rupa Subramanya

Rupa Subramanya recently published her conclusion that there had indeed been a rise in ‘mob violence’ since Modi came to power. Admirers of Narendra Modi would be well advised to not dismiss Rupa Subramanya the way they may savage his blind critics. She had been a vocal champion of Prime Ministerial candidate Modi. Surely, she can’t have gone off him, unless there are reasons she knows best.
I wouldn’t dream of messing with her for two more reasons. For one, she’s an economist of some repute. I can scarcely claim any right to argue with her, save what the SM gives me. The seeming technical rigour of her article finds me totally out of depth, what with terms like structural break, Chow test, and Quant-Andrews test. There are charts too, which I can however figure out. She points to a clearly upward trending line- which everyone seems to have taken as cow-related violence.
Why? We'll see.
She’s also certain enough to name the precise moment the uptick in violence began: June 2014.
Another reason I wouldn’t cross her path is, she’s an aggressive lady. She recently attacked Anand Ranganathan on Twitter over his findings on cow-related violence, which is antipodal to her’s. I know Ranganathan to be a serious scientist, as solid in his field as Subramanya probably is in hers. He’s also unaffiliated to any particular camp and calls out stupidity in whatever ‘wing’ of politics it emanates from.
If he copped her anger, I stand no chance. So let me step out of that road.
But I have my own layman’s questions to ponder.

Prophet & Laws

Let’s begin with Marxism. For most of a century, it had a craggy, bearded Prophet staring down at you from everywhere. For half a century, world’s best universities produced apostles interpreting Marx’s word as the key to a Utopian future of economic equality. When Gorbachev and Deng abandoned Marxism, you’d have thought Marx’s flock would have dispersed and merged into the emerging capitalist societies.
But no. It morphed into ‘Cultural’ Marxism. If classical Marxism was about the haves pitted against have-nots, Cultural Marxism pits the ‘oppressed’ against ‘oppressors’. And you know what? The morphed version of Marxism is hugely successful. It in fact penetrated the West in ways the original version could not. Today, it thrives in academia, the social sector and enjoys patronage from wealthy Foundations.

What happened in Gujarat, 2002?

This single photo of Qutbuddin Ansari told me the whole shameful story of what happened in Gujarat in 2002. It was enough to make me retch and weep. But the truth is, the 1984 Delhi massacre of Sikhs had prepared me for what an Indian mob can do. Being the land we are, we’d have, in normal times, been angry a while and moved on with our lives. But we were not  allowed to take 2002 in our stride. Stories on those days would not cease.
I don’t have a clinching narrative on what exactly happened in 2002- but then who does? Certainly not the legion which has built whole careers gouging the riots. As their narratives began, and grew limbs and grotesque faces,I sensed an overkill. I eased down a bit and asked myself: are they shaping a spontaneous event into a political opportunity?