The tiny Dehradun airport was a melting pot in itself, an anathema. Brown men and women strutted in jackets and Levis' jeans and iPhones. White dudes, piously clad in saffron kurtas and some sporting the lone tuft of hair symbolic of caste 'pedigree', retired to the corner with self-help books and black coffees. A stately European woman walked to one of the gates, and rolled out a mat to the side. Oblivious to the sniggers all around, the woman started twisting and turning before switching to rapidfire sequences of Bhujangasana, Vakrasana and gymnastics that were plain inhuman. People stared; some looks were curious, some were amused, and others were lustful. And then it struck me—as I looked at a group of disparagingly gleeful pahari youngsters, and the religious fervency that marked every movement of the woman in the heart of Dev Bhoomi (God's Land)—we had lost yoga.
More than a decade back, in an age where yoga was no longer the potent weapon of political polarisation that it has currently become, I was one of the four youngsters in a grade 7 class who opted for yoga classes, salivating at the prospect of an extra hour free every week. But what we got was a bearded six-foot tall monster, perpetually angry, who made us push wooden desks together and practise forming hemispherical shapes with our bodies while perched precariously on a creaking, termite-ridden surface. A slight mistake in the asanas would earn us a sharp rap on the bum with a wooden ruler. A more serious mistake would merit an hour of standing still in the sweltering sun, the right hand raised in a half-mast Nazi salute, till the shoulders became lead. My limited point being, I have a good reason to hate on yoga, but what about you?
That yoga has almost achieved the status of an independent religion in the US is a given. A 2016 report in Yoga Journal says the number of yoga practitioners has increased 50 per cent to 36 million. The yearly expenditure of yoga practitioners—classes, equipment, accessories—increased from $10 billion to $16 billion. And there have been countless spin-offs—like Hot Yoga trademarked by Bikram Choudhary (student of Yogananda's brother Bishnu Ghosh) and Holy Yoga, a Christian interpretation of yoga that can deepen the bond with Jesus. And there have been countless entertaining versions—everything from Goat Yoga to Laughter Yoga, and, I kid you not, Harry Potter Yoga. I mean, come on. To our credit, we, as a generation, stayed true to all the stereotypes of being entitled wusses who find it difficult to get off our asses long enough to buy basic sustenance from a restaurant half a kilometre away. And, we did what we loved—lying flat on our asses (shavasana), with a beer bottle balanced on our tummies, in an extremely taxing session of beer yoga, the alternate option being making mommie and papa proud by contorting ourselves into strange shapes while listening to PM Modi's Mann ki Baat?
And, aiding and abetting Modi in the virtuous endeavour of taking back yoga is none other than, you guessed it, the NRIs. Organisations like the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) are already on the warpath in the United States, calling for the de-deracination of the practice. The practice has become so ubiquitous that its Hindu roots have been forgotten, says Suhag Shukla, executive director of HAF, leading the ‘Take Back Yoga' campaign. "Yoga, Vedanta and Ayurveda have been, to an extent, delinked from Hinduism," she told me in a previous interview. "It is the caste-cow-karma problem all over again. We need to shed light on the beauty of our culture and show that there is a huge gap between philosophy and what people might see outwardly."
True, my analyses of yoga losing popularity could be personal bias and mere conjecture. There are practically zero surveys of yoga habits among Indians available on the public domain. But, heed me on this, millennials. Look to your left and look to your right. When was the last time you saw your colleagues or neighbours touch their toes, let alone wrap their legs around their head. Now, if you will excuse me, I am late for my Zumba class.