In The Guardian, Randeep Ramesh goes to Haridwar to meet Yoga evangelist Swami Ramdev:
At 5am beneath the Shivalik hills in northern India, Swami Ramdev sits cross-legged swaddled in saffron robes commanding the rapt attention of 500 devotees of his brand of yoga. The crowd is made up mostly of middle-class Indians, many suffering from chronic conditions for which traditional medicine has little to offer but comfort.
Each “patient” has paid 7,000 to 40,000 rupees (£90 to £500) to be among the first to spend a week at the swami’s newest venture: a village of 300 bungalows offering spiritual retreat in the shadow of eucalyptus trees.
Swami Ramdev’s pitch is that pranayama, the ancient Indian art of breath control, can cure a bewildering array of diseases. “Asthma, arthritis, sickle-cell anaemia, kidney problems, thyroid disease, hepatitis, slipped discs - and it will unblock any fallopian tubes,” he tells his audience in the yoga village, who line up to have their blood tested and receive herbal remedies.
Asiya Andrabi founded the notorious moral police Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of the Faith) in Kashmir. In The Times of India, Sarmila Ganesan meets her in Srinagar:
When Asiya Andrabi first went to buy a burqa at the age of 19, the shopkeeper told her she was too young for one. He didn’t even stock much burqa material then as it was hardly in demand. Today, seated in her in-laws’ home in downtown Srinagar, covered from head to toe in a thick black burqa, the 45-year-old says things are different now. In many ways, she feels responsible for this change. “Islam has instructed women to cover themselves completely,” says Andrabi, who is wearing white gloves and dark glasses too. A few years ago, Andrabi, along with other burqa-clad women, had sprayed “harmless” paint on the faces of Muslim women who were not veiled. Subsequently, she was arrested. For being a threat to national security.
“What has morality got to do with a country’s security?” asks Andrabi, president of a separatist organisation she formed in 1981 called Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of the Faith), which was banned in 2002 under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. She believes that Kashmir is a part of Pakistan.
In The New York Times, Holly Morris, the author of “Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for a New Kind of Heroine,” reviews “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” by Pico Iyer.
Do you get the impression that the Dalai Lama is not exactly the brightest bulb in the room?” a journalist asked Pico Iyer after both men left a speaking event by His Holiness. We know what he’s getting at. At a certain angle, the chirpy aphorisms, the generous stream of book forewords, the Hollywood entourage, all conspire to cast a hue of superficiality that few global pop icons escape.
In that light, it is possible to forget that the Dalai Lama is, in fact, a titan: a head of state, a doctor of metaphysics, a prolific author, a hyperrealist, a newshound, a godhead to the Tibetan people and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize - a man who embodies a “simplicity that lies not before complexity but on the far side of it.”
As the violence in Tibet has continued, the Dalai Lama issued a stern statement that he could not align himself with insurrection in his home country. Buddhism rests on several pillars, one of which is nonviolence. Tibet quickly became a kind of Buddhist litmus test. How much pain and oppression can you stand and still exhibit loving kindness and compassion? I wonder if that’s really fair. The Tibetans face a political crisis that should be met with political action. Whatever that action turns out to be, nobody should be seen as a good or bad Buddhist, anymore than defending your house from an intruder tests whether a Christian is living by the precepts of Jesus.
He has been described as the ‘Monk on a Motorcycle’ and is known to play Frisbee and dance at discos. Shekhar Gupta talks to Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, an Indian monk with a wide following, on NDTV 24×7:
Q: So what makes you different? What is it that sets you apart?
“See, I don’t come from any scholarship. I have not read the Vedas or the Upanishads. I just confess I have not read the Gita.”
Q: You ride a motorbike, you wear designer glasses, you drive a Land Rover, and you dance at disco parties. Is it part of your brand image? Or is it to say that you can be normal and spiritual (at the same time)?
“Being spiritual is being normal. If you are not spiritual, you can be handicapped. What you call spiritual is an experience that is beyond the physical.”
The gurus of permissiveness are missing, so are the scandals. The Osho meditation resort in Pune is a sign of a cult that has grown up. Sunanda Mehta in The Indian Express:
The labels “commune” and “ashram” have been unceremoniously dropped, Ma and Swami shrugged off as prefixes. Life-size photographs of the man with the flowing beard and piercing eyes, Rajneesh Chandra Mohan Jain aka Acharya Rajneesh aka Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh aka Osho, have disappeared from the walls and corners. The swirl of maroon robes remains-you still have to wear one to enter-as does the initiatory ritual of an HIV test. But the Pune ashram of the man who preached a path from sex to superconsciousness is a sanitised space-the Osho International Meditation Resort.
The easy thing, of course, would be to succumb to the notion, as well as the opinion of many an old-timer, that in its compulsion to keep up with the times, the centre has somewhat misplaced its soul. The trappings of modern-day luxury that dot the 40-acre complex, from the huge swimming pool to the Jacuzzis, from the tennis courts to the restaurants, will bear you out. The drug orgies that shocked Pune in the ’90s don’t make headlines anymore and there is more than a whiff of conformism in the description of the place as “the only place in the world that combines meditation with resort facilities”.
One of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s biggest fans and followers was neo-noir film director David Lynch, who has authored films such as Blue Velvet and Lost Highway that explore something that seems more like subterranean consciousness. David runs a charity that aims to teach children TM and he has given many talks on the benefits of meditation.
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Faith, Health | Tagged: India, Yoga, Baba Ramdev, Pranayama | 
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