apoplectic [x-posted from my blogspot]
I'm traveling to Bangalore tomorrow for a day to visit the yoga getaway I adverted to earlier. My dad's importuning came to a head sometime last week, and I must have decided that it was better to satisfy his wish and get it over with then to endure a decade of hearing about how I squandered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience the miracles of faith healing or whatever. In my family it's easy to develop a laissez-faire attitude toward parenting, I feel, precisely because we tend to be subjected to the exact opposite. I have nothing against yoga per se. Indeed, many of my (frankly hipsterish) visions of the ideal life involve yoga and yogurt in some form. And I would have nothing against betaking myself to this godforsaken confluence of latitudes and longitudes that scientists would be baffled to discover intersect, if it had any of the charm or the cuteness that the name "yoga getaway" would suggest. I picked that term for lack of anything polite to say, and believe me, I've spent the greater part of this past week alternately regretting having acceded to my dad's entreaties and coming up with colorful epithets for the place. For example, one might say that the yoga getaway in question puts the "Shitgalore in Bangalore".
As I was saying, I have nothing against yoga per se; but when it's accompanied by occult wisdom born out of the daydreams of schizophrenics believing themselves to be doctors, one must draw the line. The self-importance of people who peddle alternative religious medicine under the belief that just because it's older than modern medicine it must for that reason also be better is astounding. I'm sorry, but stretching "aum" out into three long syllables is not going to resonate with the lower, middle, and upper parts of your body respectively to cure you of all your ailments any more than taking a dump facing east is going to help you ace your exams.
There are few things I hate more than the tendency of Indians (read: Hindus) to deify and put on a pedestal anything they may take more than a tepid liking to. For example, "Traditions". "Mother India". I was watching a funny and rather racy Hindi sketch by All India Bakchod on YouTube recently and made the mistake of scrolling down to the comments section. A personage took exception to the fact that the video depicted Indians saying words like "fuck" and "boob" and talking about sex (basically doing everything but puja) and exhorted the channel to make videos that showed the Motherland in a better and more solemn light. True, few carry around their stuffy jingoistic cultural narcissism and self-righteous prudishness all day long. (They would not otherwise be able to lay their maids when their wives were out.) But the vast majority of Indians have a switch somewhere in their psyches that can turn them from normal insouciant individuals into these raging conservative bulls for whom everything in sight can be interpreted as an insult to Mother India by some involuted process of reasoning. Either that, or they commence marching inexorably in the opposite direction from science with no goal other than to realize the apotheosis of unscience, like the employees of Shitgalore. There is some evidence to suggest that being exposed to the above-mentioned trisyllabic "aum" can cause the switch to flip, so one must be careful when one utters it.