Quick-fix six packs

Metaphors have morphed, and how. In the days when your columnist worked in Uncle Sam’s land, a six-pack mainly meant aplastic-encased stack of beer or soda cans. One bought them for the long weekend with the caveat that excessive six-packing gave you a bulging beer belly.


This was the very opposite of the image of taut “ironingboard” abs that one associates with the six-pack simile today. Unlike the six packs of yore, one cannot buy the sextet of muscular bulges on the abdomen off the shelf ! Like good Karma, one has to earn ’em in the old-fashioned way by expending large amounts of sweat and tears, if not blood.

But this is not as hard as one may imagine. As Lloyd Stevens, the fitness guru who dramatically transformed the physique of his chela, actor Ranveer Singh, for the forthcoming film Ramleela put it, “If you want something bad enough, you will find a way, if not, you will always find an excuse.”

Sage Patanjali expressed the same sentiment in his Yoga Sutra: the keenly intense seeker progresses rapidly to his goal (Tivra samvegnam asannah).

“When the individual has tremendous inclination, puts in hard work, then the results come very fast,” says Jayadeva Yogendra of the Yoga Institute, Santacruz, in his commentary.

“(For) others who have a weak kind of desire, put in a weak effort, the results are small,” the octogenarian Yogi adds. “Samvegais the word used in this science. It is not only detachment but also a spiritual combination of a feeling of reverence, devotion, ardour.”

For the intensely focused but serenely detached seeker, success is fast indeed.