Opiate Tathagata Satpathy
A great TV personality had said a couple of years ago that the concept of Satya Yuga and Kali Yuga and all such Yugas are over. Now is the time for Nego Yuga. Nego stands for Negotiations and Yuga for Age or Time. In these stressful times, we all, to some extent, may agree that there is no complete Truth or absolute Falsehood. The blacks and the whites have melted to create a greater spectrum of grey. This is the impression that one may have when the event of this year’s Summer Solstice, 21 June 2015, is taken into account. Indian politicians of a particular hue have preferred to claim that due to the tremendous pressure mounted by the Damodardass Modi government of India on the United Nations, the latter was compelled to announce 21 June as the International Day of Yoga. Starting from schools and colleges to very many institutions, many public personalities involved themselves in celebrating this great day of Yoga with much fanfare and more of dramatic postures. The Prime Minister’s huge belly and stiff legs, the unbendable Chief Minister of Maharashtra and such other personalities stood to expose how unfit a nation we are.
The fact that Yoga is an intensely complex assimilation of mental, physical and spiritual quest was somewhat relegated to the back ground when all those thousands of people were trying to stretch out in front of India Gate of New Delhi. This Prime Minister Modi led exhibitionist mega show caused many to raise eyebrows when the news spread that the officials of the Guinness Book of World Records were summoned to record this happening solely for the purpose of it getting on to THE book. So, was the show a show only for the purposes of publicity could be a valid question.
Yoga which could be defined as bringing together of elements or balancing the inside with the outside, the spiritual with the material or the body and the soul is a complicated process. It is known and a recorded fact that wrong habits could damage a practitioner’s body or even the mind. It is also a known fact that to practise the physical aspect of yoga requires an instructor having greater experience and skill. Sadly, however, most Indian gurus who teach yoga today do not live in India. The demand for established and certified teachers has been high in the West for a long time. Seeing the financial benefits abroad and with no domestic interest, anybody who is anybody as an instructor has migrated to the west for greener pastures. Yoga has, over the years, incited many to create other forms of physical workouts such as pilates and all of them prosper overseas. Due to domestic neglect and disinterest for a very long period of time, India does not have the correct numbers and able yoga teachers and facilities to take this mammoth population back to a yogic state. What could be suggested is to start from scratch by gradually opening centres of training for yoga instructors. The initial big problem, of course, would be to find instructors to teach the future instructors. Then, in the usual Indian fashion, when many of these instructors would get their certification, jobs will elude them. These are but only superficial problems and if one goes deeper, it is easy to see how difficult and cumbersome and expensive an effort it would be to make India a yoga fit nation anytime in the current century.
All this implies that last 21 June 2015 event is just a sham. No future has been chalked out for making yoga a part of the average Indian lifestyle. Aum!
