The Hindu Business Line : Ancient answers

World Parkinson's Day (April 11) saw a number of senior citizens at the S.P. Jain Auditorium, cheerfully volunteering to be flexed into shape by Yogacharya BKS Iyengar, the internationally famous authority on yoga. (Time magazine recognised him as one of the 100 most influential persons in the world while the Oxford dictionary even defines "Iyengar" as a form of yoga!)

The Parkinson Disease and Movement Disorder Society (PMDS) had organised a programme on `Yoga and Parkinson's Disease', where the grand old man of yoga provided practical tips to patients afflicted by this neurological disorder.

PMDS and the Iyengar Yogashraya, Mumbai, collaborated to study the efficacy of yoga in influencing quality of life in patients suffering from Parkinson's.

The results showed that patients who were yoga practitioners had a significant improvement in their movements and quality of life in comparison with patients who did not do yoga.

Iyengar revolutionised the teaching of yoga by introducing various props, which make it possible even for the handicapped to benefit from this ancient Indian discipline.

Salsa fest

Socially conservative folks often look askance at Western dance. Time was when "dancing schools' in the bylanes of Mumbai were no better than pick-up joints, giving genuine practitioners a bad name.

But internationally trained dance teachers such as Sandip Soparrkar, Terence Lewis, Mirabelle D'Cruz and veteran J.J. Rodriguez have helped make a difference. Recently one could spot a large crowd of men and women doing the salsa at a festival orchestrated by Kaydee Namgyal, founder and president of the Salsa India Dance Company (SIDC).

Salsa means sauce in Spanish and those au courant with the varieties of dance forms know salsa music is a fusion of African, Cuban and other Latin-American rhythms that travelled from Cuba and Puerto Rico to New York.

The salsa fest in Mumbai was the third that Namgyal organised, dipping into his own funds to host foreign participants from Texas, Poland, France and England with names like Super Mario, Shaka Brown and Magna; plus, a string of deejays led by DJ Henry Knowles, who steered dance enthusiasts through 35 performances and workshops (not only in salsa but also other Latino dance forms like flamenco and merengue).

SIDC was first established in April 2000. Today, Namgyal oversees a total of 11 salsa studios with over 500 enthusiastic students in Delhi and Mumbai alone. Namgyal has also helped popularise salsa in places like Pune, Bangalore, Indore and his native Sikkim. He has also reached out to enthusiasts outside India in Nepal, Hong Kong and Thailand through numerous workshops.

Mohanty at a steal

Every time Prafulla Mohanty visits India, the London-based architect, artist and author of books like My Village, My Life, Indian Village Tales, Changing Life, and Through Brown Eyes spends three months in the Orissa village of Nanpur, where he was born. As always, he is accompanied by his English partner Derrick Moore, an ex-Army man who was stationed in India during the Second World War.

Mohanty was devastated when his beloved Nanpur was hit by a killer cyclone in October 1999. The storm ravaged homes, crops and cattle. The house where Mohanty was born was destroyed. Today Nanpur is grateful to Mohanty for a school and an arts centre that he had established with help from friends.

Mohanty moved to England in 1960 with an architecture degree from Bombay. In 1964 he earned a diploma in town planning at Leeds, and also held his first solo exhibition of paintings.

Since then, he has shown his work all over the world. He has also taught art and dance to children and given several performances himself. His new exhibition at Jai Bhandarkar's Landsdowne Gallery is a sellout. No, make that a steal, because the price tags on this top-drawer collection were very low.

"Mohanty is a generous man," says his old friend, the art collector and writer Rahul Singh.

Evincing a strong Tantric influence, the artworks consist of sumptuously coloured circles; suns, egg-shapes and the bindu (his very own, as distinct from Syed Haider Raza's).