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| Letters: Yoga Inc |
| Business Standard / New Delhi Oct 01, 2009, 00:02 IST |
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Hats off to Baba Ramdev. Not only has he brought Indian yoga on to prime time TV, he has bought a Scottish island to serve as a ‘wellness retreat’. Traditional Indian yoga and medicine have always held out lots of promise and there have been several attempts to harness it in a corporate set up. Successful examples of this include Dabur, Shahnaaz Hussain and, in the spiritual sense, Mahesh Yogi and others like him. But when Babaji came on the scene and was telecast live, his viewership put lots of national entertainment channels to shame — the TRPs of yoga programmes are much higher than those of the saas bahu channels. But if traditional Indian healers like Baba Ramdev are to get scientific recognition, they have to submit themselves to a different level of scrutiny. Baba Ramdev came up short when confronted by Brinda Karat of the CPI(M).
In the west, practitioners of Yoga Inc have had themselves hooked up to ECG and other machines to measure their heart rates before and during meditation. The ancient Chinese science of acupuncture now measures chi flows using computers. Non-believers will always be non-believers, but for those who have an open mind, such scientific validation is an important source of comfort. In several western countries, thanks to this scientific validation, acupuncture treatment is even compensated for by insurance companies.
Asha Thakur, New Delhi
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