I will confess I am thrilled by the yoga diktat. Now that we have been told that all Indians must either do suryanamaskars or jump into the sea (or was it go to Pakistan? The threats pile up so fast, it is hard to keep track), I am finally ready to fully embrace our wise, ancient heritage. I tried yoga once and the experience was so traumatic, I would have happily jumped into a shark-filled sea.

After many months of almost setting my alarm, almost waking up and almost leaving my house, when I found myself at six on a Wednesday morning opening the door to the ‘highly recommended top-rated’ yoga studio in Gurgaon, my first worry was whether I’d bite off someone’s head because there wasn’t time to ingest the amount of coffee that is mandatory before I am able to tolerate the presence of another living being. When I walked in though, what annoyed me was how attractive everyone was.

I had expected a bunch of aunties, with their dupattas tied around their waists and struggling to keep their bellies from flopping over their knees. On the contrary, this was the abode of the lithe and the lean. The combined body fat in the room was less than that in a can of skimmed milk. Everyone had tied up their shiny hair in the perfectly messy ponytail, they wore colourful sports bras under stretchy tops and, on the teacher’s instruction, when everyone closed their eyes and ‘focused inwards’ for a minute, all I could do was gape around and be amazed at the ungooped mascara in the perfect lids fluttering mildly around me. With my hair sticking out from last night’s braid, my face set in the vicious scowl of the under-caffeinated and what is indubitably a muffin top spilling above the waist band of my tights, I was an interloper in this universe of the attractive. When the instructor told us to breathe deeply into our chakras, and perfectly proportioned diaphragms around me tightened, it took all I had to hold my breath so I wouldn’t burst into tears.

By the time the next session rolled around, I was slightly better prepared. I woke up earlier, drank more coffee, took some care with my appearance and picked the best clothes that camouflaged my many flaws. But prepared as I was for all the meditative beauty around me, I could barely get any yoga done. “Raise your hands above the head,” I would hear the instructor say, “and with your eyes firmly closed, stretch up and then forward and all the way down until your palms are on the floor.” At this, my mind like a greedy dog in a bakery would go, “wow, look at her waist,” “goodness, his biceps are literally rippling,” “that belly button is a perfectly round innie, like a mischievous, itinerant full stop”. When others were doing their breathing exercise, all I could manage was to not stare for too long at one person’s stomach. “Om one, Om two, Om three, look elsewhere,” I barely managed one anulom-viloom in peace. By the time it was shavasan , a veritable reel of early morning pornography would be playing in my mind. All tight abs and stretchy lycra. It was torture. I lasted two weeks before I decided that the fees I’d paid was not worth this, and that even if I could manage to contort my body into some of those poses, my mind certainly was not wired for yoga. So I gave up.

Cut to the present. I had never watched Baba Ramdev on television, except for the day when he showed us that a salwar kameez and a 12-inch long beard don’t go together. So imagine my surprise when I first saw the pictures of Information and Broadcasting minister Prakash Javadekar. Wearing a striped T-shirt and track pants, in the first photo, Javadekar was sitting on a yoga mat laid out on a lawn. It did nothing to me. In the second, he was sprawled on the ground, arms akimbo, his legs a blur so that the track pants looked like a mermaid’s tail, and his face contorted in one of those ugly grimaces which I suppose appear if you’re trying to make yoga look fun to photographers. It was, well, to put it simply, not sexy at all. Then came the images of Manohar Lal Khattar and Baba Ramdev. They seem to be resting on slightly raised haunches, their tongues hanging out. With my limited experience, I am not sure what asana it is, but it is nothing like the upward dog I’d conjured up. By the time we are done with the telecast of the Yoga Day celebrations tomorrow, which I am certain will have many images of septuagenarian RSS members in khaki shorts attempting the pawan muktasan , I’ll be able to view the exercise with ice-cold dispassion. The trouble with the western world and English-speaking India holding on to yoga the last few decades was that they managed to make it look awesome. If the unattractive attempted yoga, it was only behind closed doors. It’s high time we reined it back into the preserve of the inept and the unsightly.

@veenavenugopal

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