Yogi and commissar

Akio Morita, the legendary co-founder of Sony, apparently had a hard time with investors and colleagues when he first pitched the idea of making the Walkman to them. Why anyone would want to use, much less buy, a portable music player, they asked. Morita replied with the story of the two successful shoe salesmen from competing companies who were sent to the countryside to check out business prospects there. Upon his arrival, the first salesman immediately went around on a survey and within an hour called back headquarters in exasperation , “Seems like a total waste of time; everybody’s barefoot!” His rival also made an equally-quick assessment only to call his bosses excitedly, “Send as much stock as you can spare; we’re going to make a killing!”

Aprominent yoga guru in the US is said to have narrated Morita’s story while looking at the number of yoga practitioners in the country: nearly 7% of the adults practised yoga and 8% more said they were extremely interested, while half of them said they would try yoga within the next year. “What about the rest?” is indeed a zillion-dollar proposition in monetary terms: the collective expenditure on yoga in the US was now estimated to be $27 billion a year, and if the business was to be consolidated , the resulting Mega Yoga Corp was expected to be slightly larger than Dow Chemical, and abit smaller than Microsoft.

“What about the rest” would be an equally-enticing question even if one were to disregard artha (money) and look purely at the prospect of propelling people towards moksha or liberation , which anyway was yoga’s avowed goal? This was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s refrain — yoga and TM lead to better health not just on an individual level but if enough people practice, global peace will follow.

So what’s keeping the rest from embracing yoga? For all that hype about it as a transnational pop phenomenon, westerners still know little about it or harbour misconceptions. The commonest is its alleged religious connection , a survey on Yoga USA Day (January 23) found: respondents (57%) felt it required chanting related to a particular form of worship; 59% thought it needed flexibility, being in ‘decent’ space, although anyone in any shape or physical state can benefit.

The other deterrent was the notion that yoga was unfit for ‘real men’ . So yoga needed mythbusters.