Walking the walk, talking the talk

Before we begin, this is a yoga post.  Not the usual experience in hot room post but rather a perspective on how the world is reacting to Yoga today based on latest media reports.

Three things sparked this post and I will list them in chronological order:

1. A friend of mine who knew I do Bikram Yoga but not much about the Yoga or Bikram recently told me "dude, I saw in the news that the guy who came up with this yoga you do is accused of a lot of bad things. So be careful with the yoga you do!"

2. Indian media reports in last month have a flurry of articles on Shri Shri (Art of Living), his recent event near Delhi and his tweets on cricket matches and articles on Baba Ramdev, another popular Yoga teacher/activist for his statements on what constitutes patriotism and the follow up internet memes about "does yoga help grow a brain?"

3. An article in YogaInternational which claims to debunk Bikram Yoga

Here is my perspective from personal experience.

Bikram Yoga worked for me. It continues to do the job for me. It has been nothing short of a miracle for me. By extension, I can say "Hatha yoga worked for me" and "the heat worked for me". Now what do I mean by "worked"?

Walked into the hot room for the first time, five years ago,  being 18-20 lbs over weight, depressed and having a range of other health issues after an accident in what can only be described as a downward spiral at work and home. Within a month I was back at my normal weight and feeling positive. With a fresh energy that made me a better person, it helped me through even tougher times at home and work over the next few years. Bikram Yoga turned that downward spiral into an upward spiral with positivity reinforcing more positive things. 

Could this be just me? The answer is No. It was definitely the Yoga. It is true that I work my ass off in the hot room and give it everything I got,  but still, it was the Yoga that made a difference. There is something magical about the way this sequence is put together that it worked, for me.

Does this work for everyone? The answer again is No. I happened to be at the right place at the right time in the right mindset. Had nothing to lose by walking into the room and everything to gain. The visual and non visual changes made me go back into the room, over and over and over again. More than 20 people have joined or tried Bikram Yoga after seeing me change over the last five years, but only 4 are still doing it. They all have their reasons for dropping out. Don't like the sweat, the smell, don't like to wash my hair so often, it is too long a time commitment, I am already flexible enough, etc. etc. None of them told me they stopped coming, because they injured themselves or they were afraid of their image because of what they hear in the news about Bikram or any of the other prominent Yoga teachers. 

Does it have to work for everyone? Hell, NO! If you are not serious about making a change and cannot take an opportunity to turn your life around, no yoga is going to work for you. The folks who have issues with the heat have tried other yoga and it works for them. The folks who have issues with 90 minutes have tried other forms of yoga for shorter times and some of them are very happy with the improvements. 

Does Bikram Yoga work? The answer is Yes! Have seen many miracles like me out there over the years. The folks who see the benefit come repeatedly. It seems to be a hit or miss thing. Based on the stats I collect, chances are, if you are a type A personality, Bikram Yoga has a higher chance of working for you. 

If you want to get results from Yoga you need the following basic ingredients:

- Right Teacher :There are tons of youtube videos on the poses and how to do them, but there is no substitute for a teacher who goes over the nuances. The devil is in the details. It is very easy to hurt yourself by doing the wrong thing in a yoga class (I am told it is easier to injure oneself in normal temperature classes compared to hot room classes) and blame the yoga for your injuries. A teacher who is qualified and has been through this learning experience first hand works better than a Youtube video. 

- Right method : Know what you are doing.  Not based on what you think the right thing is from your mind or just from your bodies feedback. If I only listented to the voice in my head that told me what my body was capable of doing, should have quit yoga after day 2. Listen to the teacher.

- Right commitment : Consistency and sincerity in any practice will help move it in the right direction. That goes for any learning. Practice makes perfect and in this case it is an asymptotic relationship towards perfection. 

- Right mindset : Keeping an open mind to learning new things first hand as opposed to infering from other people's experience definitely helps. 

I have only done Bikram Yoga in the last five years but the things above are generic enough for learning anything new, be it a musical instrument or a new language and chances are, with any type of Yoga, a right teacher, technique, dedication and mindset will go a long way. 

All that said, all three of those things that prompted me to write this post go towards three things.

Do not link the Yoga to the Yogi:

Yoga has not changed over the years. Pretty much every posture that you can do with the hardware a human being has, is out there in all its variants and documented extensively in stone to paper to 0's and 1's.

Over time, folks have come up with routines that are optimized towards different results. The most popular ones seem to take a "greatest benefit for the average person" approach. They are like Children's Tylenol. Works great for most kids for most ailments. Then of course you cannot expect to cure cancer with it. 

Do all Yoga teachers who have created a successful routine or a successful franchise or following, required to be perfect human beings? It is a fallacy of human kind to venerate and elevate humans to god status and then see their gods go down in their own eyes. Goes for politicians, sportstars, movie stars and definitely Yoga gurus! People may be fallible and not perfect all the time. That does not mean the works they create are bad. It is very much possible that someday I will lose my mind as an older person, but that does not take away everything I do till I reach that age. 

Before you decide to believe others on Yoga's efficacy, try it yourself : 

Yoga in this context is like religion. There has to be faith first. Then there is the way. Then again, there is no "one way". The way you want is the one that works for you and that doesn't have to work for everyone. 

The difference between Yoga and religion is that in Yoga, a set of physical exercies and breathing has the ability to transform minds even though nothing is being said about the mental transformation in the class. You come in day and and day out and do the exercises, but it changes the way you think, about yourself and your relationship to everything around you. You know it is the exercise because, you get these brilliant moments of clarity in the middle of struggling through the exercises.

You have to try Yoga with the right pre-requisites. If someone else got injured doing yoga, died during yoga training (first time I heard that was in this Yogainternational article) etc. etc. one of those pre-requisites was not there. If you are not the type who is good at taking instructions from a teacher, chances are you are likely to injure yourself. Same goes for the other pre-requisites.. right teacher, right method, right commitment. 

Don't take my word for it : 

We live in a world where the lines between opinion and fact are being blurred by Like buttons and 140 characters at a time, a world where it is difficult to differentiate between a genuinely researched news article and an infomercial. It is also a world where people with responsibility, following, power and money are the ones most likely to abuse it.

I can request you go to find a Bikram Yoga studio and try a class with a teacher who went to teacher training with Bikram himself, to ensure you are not going to injure yourself and come out with a positive learning experience. Chances are you might end up in one of the 1000's of studios that claim to be Bikram Yoga but have teachers who teach whatever they want for however long they want. It is like buying coffee at the Starfucks store, where the lady on the cup looks very similar, but you drink at your own risk!

Finally, Yoga is getting a bad rap either because of some Yogi's words and actions, mistakes by the press or people like you and me believing blindly in what others say or do. The fact that Yoga has survivied for thousands of years is a testament to its ability to prevent ailments and enable faster healing, not to mention its ability to open minds for a lot of people. There are some who say it will work for everyone. I am not going that far. It might work for you. 

I for one, am happy that it works for me!  

Just indifferent to Paris

Yesterday there was a lot of watercooler talk at work. Given I don't have any social apps on my phone since the "Vrath" and I stopped listening to the radio while driving to and from work, was living in my own world. A few of my coworkers broke the news to me that 50 plus people were dead in Paris and there were multiple co-ordinated terror attacks and a hostage situation. 

When I came home Jr. asked me "Appa, do you know that there is a terror attack in Paris?" and I responded "yes". The little one chimed in with "Good thing your friend is back in the USA!" 

Somehow, I did not feel like reacting to this last night, with the usual :

- change my profile picture with a superimposed French flag

- write a one line status update to say how I feel for the French

- go like those new profile pictures 

etc. etc.

Those things don't do diddly squat towards a root cause fix.

My friends who are living in a parallel universe with exclusive news from Fox are quick to point out how "all muslims are terrorists" yet again. 

I am no saint. I have my share of bigotry, when looking up to my gun owning friends for an answer, everytime some idiot or deranged person goes on a rampage killing a few dozen people at some college or school or movie theater. Why should every gun owner apologize for the doings of some "deranged person"? It is not fair, because not all gun owners are mass shooters,  much the same way every muslim doesn't need to apologize for what happened in Paris because all muslims or not terrorists. 

We live in a world which is very well connected but we are also numb and immune to a lot of things because they are "out of sight and out of mind". We as a people need to understand that what goes around comes around. 

Have not seen many friends change their profile pictures to make a statement that said, what was happening in Syria to hundreds of thousands of innocent people was wrong, even when that four year old floated onto the european coast. When we are expected to feel so strongly for a 120 Parisians compared to 120,000 Syrians, there is something wrong with this world. 

The potential of human beings is not ratio'ed out based on their nationality or religion. 

Some of my friends have actually come out and said  "terrorism has a religion, it is called Islam"!

Well, show me a religion and I will show you a terrorist who claims he belongs to that religion and he is doing whatever he is doing, because of his religion. There are even buddhist terrorists in today's world! Religion is a means to an end. When the means become the end, we have a problem.

Also, nut job is a nut job in any part of the world, irrespective of religion. If folks are willing to blow themselves up or willing to be blown to bits in the name of defending god and country, it is time to rethink the solution to the problem. It is unlikely that we will eliminate religion. We can eliminate socio economic and political divides that are created by religious differences.

We need to see everyone the way we expect others to see us. If we are indifferent to the world, sooner or later the world will be indifferent to us. 

Can see that happen to me already. I have closed my window to the world. There was a time when I used to meet friends for lunch on a regular basis, meet old collegues, have tea with friends at home, call my family in India, on a more regular basis and stay in touch. Those things have dwindled down in favor of bowing down to my new god, the almighty USD!  In my attempt to reach his potus feet as fast as possible (it is an American god, pretty sure, it is a very male chauvinistic HIM.. because if it was a HER, the god will be worth only 65 cents..), I have changed a lot of priorities. 

Also given that every 15 -20 days there is a terror attack, drone strike, mass shooting and the occasional natural calamity in the form of earthquakes, tsunamis and heavy rain or floods, one feels the need to automate the obligatory condolence and solidarity messages on social media to say "I am with the crowd". 

What really gets me more than the terror attacks, is the quick response of the media in the US, to justify their phobias and their previous propaganda. This is specially true of Fox news clips that folks are sharing with me on Facebook.

Going forward, you will not see me post solidarity messages for anything. Yours truly will be happy to be one with himself and be able to not flinch, the next time someone says "terror attacks in abc or xyz". 

It is time for us to show that the USA, IS the greatest country in the world, not because it can proclaim itself so, based on the value of the USD and the number of weapons it has, but because it is able to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. 

If you can proclaim "non-violence" you don't even have to enforce "non-violence". If you proclaim violence, you will only be enforcing more violence in a vicsious never ending cycle. 

When I wrote that the US should not go to war in Iraq after 9/11 a lot of folks were upset with me. That vendetta war and the destabilization of the middle east has left us scars that will last a long time. Now there is a call for war with the middle east without knowing who we are fighting.

All the rhetoric that pits people against people in increasing numbers, is not going to help. 

Both Obama and Hollande are saying "Unity" will help us get through this. 

I agree.

It is time to Unite with the folks in the middle east and share their pain. It will help us get through this, not tomorrow or the day after, but maybe in this lifetime! It will get us to resolve all that is wrong with the world, much faster than another dozen drone strikes or by sitting in the comfort of our living room changing profile pictures.

It is time to spread some peace people! 

ps. See myself right now as part of the problem, not part of a solution. The solution is peace, not war. So if I don't speak up for peace now, I am just fueling the fire. You cannot fight fire with fire. You fight violence with peace, not with more violence. 

The "Vrath"

The last 7 days was a self imposed ban on all news feeds. Don't want to say "internet" because I still had to work. There was no listening to the radio, no watching TV programs, no facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube.. nothing. 

Started is last Thursday and went back to the internet this afternoon. It was an interesting experience for so many reasons.

First, did not know I was this addicted to my phone. How it got to this point over time is beyond me. The first two days, there were severe withdrawal symptoms. You see the damn icons on the phone and you have to resist the temptation to click it. It was a lot more difficult than originally anticipated.

Second, I have been shutting out the outside world thanks to this addiction without even realizing it. On Friday morning drove to work without turning on the radio. It was so intense to sit in the silence of the car and hearing the occasional sound that would reach through the closed windows. It was eerie because it was not the "usual".

At lunchtime, I had to look at the food, savor it and eat it. It got to me. So I went and sat with a bunch of colleagues and ate lunch with them for a change. Usually I eat lunch in my office and read the news and the food doesn't go in well as most of the news is negative. Enjoy my lunches now as the smiles of coworkers! For someone who was a very social person, this is a shock.

Later in the week, got to watch Jr. practice saxophone and the little one practice her violin. Instead of listening to them while simultaneously fiddling with my phone, it was an interactive practice. They were amazed that I was actually noticing things all this time inspite of fiddling with the phone. I was surprised by that too.

Every night we watch either "baby photos" or two 5 minute clips of  "How its made"  where the kids pick the item being made. We skipped it because of the Vrath (Vratham as it is referred to in Tamil.. aka Fasting). The one week without internet-news thing was given the name Vrath.. as daddy was "fasting" from the internet of sorts. The kids thought I could have made an exception there, but I didn't want to do it. One minute you are watching "how its made" and next thing you know.. there is something about Syria and the congress clowns that takes your blood pressure through the roof. So stayed clear to maintain the promise.

Finally, when I got back to the news today, it was like nothing had changed. India still looks like it is turning into Sierra Leone from the blood diamond days with a rise in child warriors, politics is still the same, people still talking and arguing about guns, abortions, gay rights, expensive medicines, etc. etc. Given all that, the last week of abstaining from news somehow made me numb to this today. Looked at it for a second and just closed it. Now that there is a realization that none of this matters, just simply closed it and moved on. It sounds simple but it is not easy. I could not do this before. Maybe something was or is still wrong with me, but it took this trial to let things go, news wise. 

The FB feed and twitter feed were a similar story. I did watch a few clips from the daily show in the last hour and laughed.. but that is twisted in its own way. Initially you laugh and later it gets to you. The daily show is like eating my grandma's vaththa kozhambu. When you mix it with rice and taste it, it is divine, but once it reaches your intestines, no amount of buttermilk is going to calm your ass for what is to come. Once in a while she has tricked me with that. Yet again, I digress. 

Starting today, excluding Netflix watching, there will be 1 hour maximum of internet a day and this will not be at lunch time either. It will be after kids go to bed. Deleting all social network apps on the phone as well. 

For someone who does Yoga every chance he gets, I have been feeding my mind crap all this time, outside the yoga room. It is not okay to eat healthy and do yoga and go back to feeding the head with all the negativity, thanks to the phone and internet. Need more positive things in life.. 

Wish me luck!

Google, you can do better..

Last week, I was trying to look up old posts to link to something I was writing.

Three for three, the Google ads on the right sidebar were something like this.. 

My first thought was "hey, don't I know the woman in the top picture? have seen her somewhere before!"

Then realized that it is exactly the same ad where I had seen her before. the mind is a funny thing. It makes these associations.

Yes. I agree. There IS a "sweet Asian Woman I should be with" and she has a name already.. Sangeetha! 

If Google was smart enough, it would have figured it out. 

On the bright side, they have figured out the right demographic based on my travel habits.  For a good six months they were showing ads for the "sweet Russian woman I should be with". Sooner or later they will zero in on "Indian woman I should be with", then figure out I am already with a sweet woman and finally pitch me something else. Or so one hopes.. 

For crying out loud, there are very few things that are interesting to me right now Google. My life is an open blog!

Work, Home and Bikram Yoga

If it is work, pitch me things that will make travel a breeze (doesn't have to be sweet Asian women.. that is taking it to an extreme)

If it is home, it has to be "back to school" related.. pitch me something that I will be tempted to buy for the kids or for myself, which is restricted to food and photography (don't bother with the Nikon ads either. You should have figured out that I am too deeply invested in Canon to move now after 25 years). As for buying things for the "sweet girl", she would rather buy it herself. So you have to work a little harder and pitch me those things based on what she is checking out online. A little help there would be nice!

If it is Yoga, then you know what you can pitch.

It IS really that simple!

What will the US Supreme court decision on gay marriage mean to Chennai?

Short answer : Possibly Nothing! Hopefully, something!

Long answer : This long winded blog post

It was the mid 1980's.  I was going to Parry's corner in Madras, by bus, with my grandfather to buy something for one of my aunt's weddings. We could not find seats next to each other in the crowded bus. So my grandpa sat two rows behind me. Then folks changed seats a few times at the next few stops. A muslim man with a white cap and a beard dyed red with marudhani (henna) sat next to me. For some strange reason, he decided to expose his private parts through his dhoti and smiled a weird smile. I froze. Had no idea how to react to that. Also did not understand why me! When he got off in the next stop, I promptly told my grandfather what had happened.  He was livid and very upset. Told me "there are all kinds of people in the world. Please try to forget what he did and move on", and move on we did. That was my first intro to a "gay man" and possibly a "child molestor".  We used to interact with a lot of muslims on a day to day basis in St. Mary's road, but I was always wary of guys with a white cap and red beard. It was subconscious. 

1990 in Varanasi. A bunch of students walking out of a movie theater in the evening. A group of Transgender folks dressed in bright sari's with sparkly glass and reflective decorations stitched in their blouses,  circle a few of us. They do a dance that looks like a cross between line dancing and the Chardash but in a circle. (Note, at that time neither of those dances were known to me).

Some local guys tell us to pay them what we have, if we want to be left alone. Pressure mounts, as some of the "hijiras" start touching the faces of some in our group. So we cave, empty our pockets and get out of the spot as they smile and do actions with their hands that  suggest "may no one cast their evil eye on you" (you have to be Indian to get that last one). Turns out they bless you will all their heart, once they get your money! Well, that was my first intro to Transgender people. Not exactly a great intro either.

Did not know or meet any Lesbians during my first 20 years in India. If there were any I interacted with, they did not let me know their sexual preference! 

The concept of a gender transforming person is introduced to us as kids in mythology. Vishnu becomes Mohini to trick the asuras out of getting the nectar of immortality, Krishna takes a female form in the Mahabharata and Arjuna dresses up as a woman for a year under the guise of Brihannala, but in a country with 330,000 plus gods and counting, what with gods that look white, blue, black, red, green, gods that borrow body parts from the animal kingdom, plant based gods, etc. etc., there are no gay or lesbian gods!

India is like an App store for gods. Usually "We have a god for that". No gay gods though. That kind of hints at why we don't have homosexuality on the radar. Either that or my knowledge of gods needs to improve significantly. 

Spent the first 16 years of my life, within a 4 block radius and followed a routine for 12 of those years. The next four years was an education, not in Metallurgical Engineering or Technology, but in knowing folks from other parts of India. Learned that there is a big world out there!

At that time my interaction was still 99.99% with people within the Indian subcontinent. A few palestinian students at the University, a few international tourists who interacted with me outside the temple or asked for directions, that was it. Almost all of the tourists were white. Not Chinese, Japanese or Black. When ones exposure to people from the world is limited to folks who look alike, crossing inbuilt primal racial defenses is the first order of business, leave alone gender biases!

Then I end up in the City of Brotherly love! A big black customs inspector shakes my hand and says "Welcome to the USA". My hand looks like a babies hand within his hand. I stand in awe at his size and friendliness. The grad student welcome a few days later, has folks in every shape size and color! Then my soon to be roomate and me pick up a bunch of free magazines stacked up in the corner so we can go apartment hunting. We were staying with a bunch of Indian seniors at the time. They look at the stack of magazines, one of which happened to be for LGBT community in the University and make a joke about it. We don't even know what the term stands for! A "community" of people like this with a monthly newspaper?! Seriously? Somehow as a group we didn't interact with any gay folks in the first few years. 

Over time, we make friends from across the globe. Lasting friendships, sharing unforgettable experiences. The built in bias to folks from different races, ethnicities, cultures were mostly torn down, thanks to the melting pot that was and is, the United States. However, some new ones did form! 

Then a step somewhere, and I end up on the ballroom dance floor.

Turns out that there is a disproportionate percentage of men who dance, that are gay. Made a lot of gay friends over the years, teachers and students alike. One of them even gave me a backhanded compliment "for an Indian guy, you seem to be okay when it comes to being open". At that time it didn't sink in. Many years later, in a discussion with a group of desi parents in Cupertino, it all came together. 

Over the years spent in the bay area, got to meet and know colleagues, customers, friends of friends who are gay. I naturally don't think of their sexual preference when interacting with them. However, found out that it is not natural for most people. 

Cupertino's resident population is predominantly Asian. I sometimes refer to it jokingly as "New Madras"  or "New Pudong" as Chinese and Indians are the biggest demographic. In my street alone, five out of six houses have at least one adult who is an immigrant.

Turns out, that a lot of the population in Cupertino, does not share the same opinion when it comes to accepting gays and lesbians (You can check out polling results for Prop 8). Many of our Chinese friends seem to be more orthodox when it comes to religious beliefs than my White friends and they take a hardline stance that homosexuality is a bible qualified sin and is curable!

As for the desi folks, they treat the topic as something of a tax for living in the bay area. Seems to be a topic that doesn't come up in the households we know. Some of the parents tell us "kids know these things from school anyways. They are still young. We have not had to talk about it". 

Our kids are growing up. They will find their way in life, much like we did. Recently, as we were driving to drop the kids in some class, a court case about legalizing gay marriage was being analyzed on NPR. The kids said "do we have to listen to this?" and for the first time I realized that my kids have already built in biases towards the LGBT community or maybe they simply didnt want to listen to NPR and preferred Taylor Swift songs on repeat mode.

So we had a chat. 

Jr. knew about LGBT "stuff" as she put it, but she said "Don't want to talk about it now". I told her that while I respected that, and we won't talk, she should not treat a person differently because of their choices and she said "okay, okay" in her usual "I agree if we stop this conversation now" tone.  The little one asked me her 20 questions and I patiently answered them while Jr. listened in. Pretty sure that they at least got the message of  "Don't discriminate"! 

When it comes to the city I was born and raised, or the city where I really grew from boy to man, things don't seem to change much over the years, at least from a myopic perspective that I get, over the occasional few days spent in India or by looking at FB and Twitter feeds from friends and family.

So, all this excitement and celebration of a small percentage of the population in the US, getting to live its life like the majority of folks, will most likely NOT make any impact.

Honestly though, unless you know a gay person and realize they are just like you, except for their sexual preference, chances are, you will not care or still have the built in bias. This is much like some of my friends who sincerely believe "all muslims are terrorists", because they have never interacted with any normal muslim family while they build their biases. This is the state of affairs, in what we call the "melting pot" of the world.

Why should I then hope that the SC decision changes something in Chennai or outside the US for that matter?

Twenty plus years ago, the USA was the international melting pot. Today, the world is melting! Even if some awareness is spread among the kids who are growing up today in India, who will soon be travelling all over the world, it will be worth it, to make the world a better place. 

We as a people, are constantly struggling with "us" vs. "them" on a daily basis and almost everything that is wrong with the world, goes back to the versus part, and the basis for those "versus".

Spreading some awareness to differences among people may be the starting point to building acceptance.