The Heart of Yoga

The KYM is an oasis in the midst of Chennai’s craziness.  The four story white building is surrounded by a modest but nonetheless beautiful garden, and this in turn is protected from the noise and rush of the city by a tall wall.  The garden has a variety of plants: some, like the bougainvillea, I recognize, but others are completely unknown to me.  A small black statue of Patanjali sits on a brick pedestal that is surrounded by plants, and there’s a beautiful gazebo tucked as far back from the street as possible which is a perfect place to sit for pranayama and meditation.

  

The first floor has the registration area, bookstore and living quarters for the maintenance staff.  The subsequent two floors seem to have offices, though I haven’t explored those much.  The fourth floor (3^rd floor button on the elevator) is where we have our classes.  There’s a small sitting area right as you come out of the elevator where students leave their shoes, but most of the floor is taken up by the classroom: a bright, airy room with a skylight that is starting to be covered with ivy.  The walls, ceiling and tile floor are all white and there are three large portraits hanging on the wall: two of T.K.V. Desikachar (one with him in the midst of mantra practice and the other of him placing his guru’s sandals on his head, an act of devotion and humility) and one of Sri T. Krishnamacharya (Desikachar’s father and guru).  The latter hangs, along with a string of white or yellow flowers that are changed daily, at the focal point of the room from which teachers lecture. 

There’s a room next door which has no clear purpose to me.  There’s a few oddly placed desks, some of them with computers.  It looks like it could be a classroom but the layout doesn’t seem conducive to lecturing.  Next to that is the bathroom. 

The rooftop is flat and has a covered sitting area where our class enjoys breakfast and tea daily.  Most of the rooftop is uncovered, though, and offers views of the city in all directions.  This is also where a few of us practice every morning on our own before our first class.

Our day is very structured: everyday we have the same classes and each lasts 50 minutes.  At 7:30a.m. we meet for asana practice.  Pink and purple mats are laid out for us by the time we get in, all of them facing the front of the class, where there’s a white mat reserved for the teacher’s assistant who demonstrates all of the asanas and vinyasas. 

After class we head to the rooftop for breakfast, which changes slightly everyday but always vegetarian and pretty reliable involves something made out of rice with a delicious, spicy sauce, a fruit bowl, a banana, toasted white bread with butter, and chai.  I have developed an appreciation for chai, so much so that I have not had coffee for a week, which anyone who knows me will tell you is an amazing undertaking for me.

By the time we get back in the room at 9a.m., the mats have been removed and the floor has been covered with large colorful blankets.  There’s cushions and tiny stools along the wall that most of us grab to use for sitting and as desks, respectively.  Many of the classes involve intense lecturing and thus note-taking so the desks come in handy. 

The Principles of Yoga class at 9a.m. is no exception.  Here we cover the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (whose statue is in the garden) and the foundational philosophy of yoga in general.  Intellectually this is probably one of the most challenging classes.  We’re talking about the nature of existence here so the stuff is not light at all.  Yoga Philosophy is closely linked to Samkhya philosophy; both are dualist and divide everything in existence into two fundamental sources: Consciousness (or the soul) and Matter (everything else).  On Thursday we had an especially involved class because the teacher presented the notion that the mind falls into the category of Matter.  The longest and most intense discussion I’ve seen yet here ensued and its resolution was more truce than agreement, I think.

At 10a.m. we have Principles of Asana, a great class where we essentially talk about why we do things in a certain way in our practice.  Lots of focus on the purpose of yoga, the mechanism and effects of asana and pranayama practice in the body and mind, and how yoga can be used to create the effects that we want. 

Then at 11a.m. we have our Vedic Chanting class.  This is the most painful of all the classes because Sanskrit pronunciation is tough and in a room of 22 people with different accents, you are bound to get variations in pronunciation and pacing.  Of all the teachers, this is the one who laughs the most.  She has a beautiful voice that she controls so precisely; most of us can’t even begin to understand how she crates certain sounds.  She does her best to remain poised during class, looking very much like an opera diva who takes her trade very seriously.  But we are so outstandingly awful at times that it drives this woman to smile a lot and laugh at least twice each class. In the last few we’ve managed to make her cover her face because she has to laugh so hard.  She tries to laugh silently but we can see her head and shoulders bobbing slightly behind her notes, though, so we know she can hardly contain herself.  This class leaves me exhausted, more so than asana, pranayama or meditation combined.

We break for lunch for 2 hours after this, which is just as well because we’re usually so spent that our brains can’t function.

There’s a few places nearby but I’ve been frequenting the same one for lunch.  A group of five of us gets together everyday and we set out for the 15 minute walk to this place.  You’d think we’d be tired of it but their food is spectacular and their menu varied enough for us to be able to try something new each time we go.  The one thing I always order is sweet lassi, a yogurt-like drink that goes a long way towards making very spicy food bearable and which is supposed to be good for the digestive system.  We usually use up every bit of those two hours eating here.  There’s no shortage of things to talk about with these folks.  Most of us come from completely different countries and many have traveled extensively.  Belgium, France, China, Mexico, Spain, Taiwan, Greece, Finland, Italy, Russia, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Canada, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, England, Indonesia and the U.S. are all represented in this group.  And most are expats or immigrants.  The South African girl is actually Chinese.  The one from Trinidad and Tobago is Indian.  Of the Americans, one lives in Indonesia, one in Spain and one is homeless (by choice) and traveling the world.  One Mexican girl is China and the other is in Spain. 

When we return from lunch at 2p.m. it’s time for Introduction to Pranayama.  Half the class is devoted to lecture and the other half to putting the concepts that were lectured on to practice.  We always do some light asana in preparation for the pranayama practice.  The postures are mostly dynamic, which means that we inhale and exhale out of them multiple times, rarely staying in the posture more than a breath or two (this is in contrast to the static postures that we practice in Ashtanga, where we move into a pose and hold it for five to 25 breaths).  Unfortunately, without mats, the layout is always a bit of a mess and many of us, especially in the center of the room, end up getting in each other’s way and having to shuffle as we change postures.  Today I smacked Andrea on the head by mistake and she spent the next few rounds trying to coordinate with my movement so she didn’t get whacked again.  She eventually moved to the front of the class.

At 3p.m. we have Applications of Yoga with Kausthub Desikachar.  We’ve actually only had one session with him since he was traveling the first few days.  We were instead having Principles of Yoga repeated at this time slot.  The only lecture we’ve had with Kausthub left most of us slightly intimidated but everyone loved his style and sense of humor so we’ll see how this progresses.

At 3:50p.m. we break for tea and biscuits and head back up to the rooftop.  What is referred to here as “biscuits” is really cookies.  Some vanilla wafers and chocolate chip cookies but there’s also some weirder ones.  We had one cream filled cookie that has faces on either side: one happy and one looking completely messed up and rabid.  On Friday we had a bubblegum flavored cookie.  The moment I bit into it, I knew exactly what it was.  Unmistakable flavor of strawberry bubblegum.  It didn’t taste bad but there was something distinctly wrong about swallowing something that tasted like gum.  I had to share it with others.  I took a cookie over to Andrea, the Mexican living in China.  She works in market research and I thought she’d appreciate it.  She recognized it as well.  “I feel very strange swallowing it,” she told me.  “You’re not supposed to swallow gum.  Why would they do this?”  And then she followed it up with “Que barbaridad!” [How barbaric!]

We are always late to class from break because we get caught up in conversation.  But at 4:10 we’re supposed to be back in the classroom for Introduction to Other Yoga Texts, where we cover the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and The Bhagavad Gita (so far we haven’t touched the latter).  Another heavy note taking class but not as intense since we’re talking fairly straight forward ideas… at least so far.

We end the day with Introduction to Meditative Practices.  The class is specifically NOT referred to as Introduction to Meditation because in this school, meditation is not seen as something you can just DO.  It has to occur spontaneously (an idea I remember my teacher expressing a few times in class).  So what they focus on is facilitating the spontaneous occurrence of meditation via asana, pranayama and chanting practices.  The desks are moved out of the way, along with anything else that takes too much space so that we can do our asanas.  We’re still on the blankets, which are laid out to cover the room and barely overlap one another.  Those of us who happen to have our hands and feet on different blankets usually start to slip because the two blankets will start to slide in different directions so the first few minutes of practice are usually devoted to rearranging ourselves.  Then we sit for a few rounds of pranayama and always end with a few minutes of silence, to let the meditation occur if it’s going to.

By the time I’m headed back to my room, I’m pooped.  The temperatures have usually cooled quite a bit so that the 85 degrees the city withstands at the height of the day even in winter are only a memory.  In the evening I usually have just enough time to shower (which is seriously needed more from how much grime you pick up just walking around than from any practice we do at school), brush, study my notes and chat with family.  I don’t bother to eat since the starchy meals earlier in the day are usually still sitting in my stomach.

These are full days and, for better or worse, they feel like they’re flying by.

The Ridiculousness that is Chennai

Everything in this city seems to have its function and its place, as strange as it may seem.  I’ve come to consider nothing, no matter how odd, out of place in Chennai.  There is room for any and all.

Today, as I walked with some new friends from school to lunch, we came across a miserable looking emaciated old man, as dark-skinned as I’ve seen here, pushing a tiny ferris wheel designed for children… or pets.  I don’t really know.  I can’t imagine any parent letting their 3 year old sit in that thing.  It’s not very tall but looks unsteady enough that it would collapse under the weight of even the smallest child.  Every inch of the thing was painted in bright colors, depicting gods and goddesses of one variety or another.  The paint could not completely conceal the dents and rust that the ferris wheel had endured , though.  The whole scene looked like something out of a messed up mythological story… or perhaps a Garcia Marquez novel.

Later on we walked past a posh looking building, and trust me these are rare in this city, with about the most unstable scaffolding I’ve ever seen.  It wasn’t even.  None of it was even.  It was clearly put together with crooked branches, tied loosely together.  It managed to look even more unstable than the children’s ferris wheel.  I’ve passed this thing twice in the last two days and have yet to see a person standing on it. 

Of all the oddities here, the one that’s most prevalent is the auto rickshaws.   They can be seen fighting traffic on pretty much every street.  They are tiny 3-wheeled vehicles that seat a driver and two people in the back but which often carry much more than that.  They are fairly minimalist, with no doors and no frills.  

Along the road to school, there’s an area that boasts a collection of rickshaws in various phases of deterioration and renovation.  It looks like a little factory.  Men are always in the process of taking one apart, welding, or giving one a new paint job.  There are some rickshaws that are simply sitting on the street as forms of storage and others are filled with what I can only imagine is trash.

Of course there’s the cows.  I’m still fascinated every time I see them.  I had read that cows wander the city freely.  They aren’t homeless, I’ve learned.  The cows are actually owned by people, and their wandering is essentially synonymous to ranchers letting their cows out for the day to graze.  Except in Chennai, nobody owns enough land for the cows to graze, so instead they are released into the city to look for food in trash bins.  They vary in size and temperament considerably.  Today I passed a huge cow that had absolutely no interest in me; it was completely engrossed in trying to get to an especially nasty looking heap of trash that was stacked on the sidewalk against a building.  It was stepping gently onto the broken pieces of pavement that had been piled together at the edge of the street.  I could tell it was not going to make it.

On other days I’ve come across cows that are skittish.  They’ll watch me coming and turn to avoid me.  I’ve come to recognize the look they get and to avoid causing them any unnecessary anxiety I usually cross the street to give them their space.  Of the entire population in this city, the cows look to be the most well fed.  But that’s to be expected: cows are treated with a great deal of reverence here.  They are considered holy and, though used for milk, they aren’t killed for meat.  In a city where a good portion of the population is starving, this isn’t a trivial thing. 

But God is everywhere here.  Everpresent, you could say.  Even in the most mundane applications.

As I was walked in traffic today I saw a tiny orange car drive by with the sign “Brahma Driving School” emblazoned on its side.  Brahma is part of the Hindu trinity, signifying creation.  How this relates to a driving school I have no idea.  But it’s everywhere.  Banks and newsstands will be decorated with multiple statues of gods and goddesses… and a cow here and there to make a point.  I wondered what it would be like if we had this approach to life in the U.S.  Christianity doesn’t offer much variety in terms of divine figures but Catholicism has enough saints that we could get pretty close.  And then walking back from lunch today I got a taste of what that would be like.  A colorful bus sat on the side of the road with a picture of Jesus on the back window.

Of course, not everything odd in Chennai is benign.  There are indications everywhere that life here can be merciless.

The street is full of strays, most of which are either mutts or breeds I don’t recognize.  Most dogs are maimed somehow, missing an ear, part of their tail or even a paw.  And all of them are filthy, coated in dust and shit most of the time.  The bare a striking resemblance to the betters, who are often maimed as well.  Their dark skin looks lighter because it’s coated in Chennai’s dust.  They walk barefoot. Some drag themselves because they can’t walk.  I’ve seen one man multiple times now who is constantly moving in an odd squat, his one working leg doing its best to meet the shape and function of his deformed one. 

None of this seems to taint their disposition, though.  A few times I’ve had these same men smile at me and say “Hello” in their best English.  A few days ago, one man, almost completely toothless and with one hand permanently twisted back towards his arm called me over as I walked by him.  He was sitting, back hunched.  I walked up to him as he wore a huge smile, eyes wide and expressive.  He asked me something that I couldn’t understand and I thought initially he was speaking Tamil.  But when I asked him to repeat and he gestured along with his words, I determined he was asking my name.  So I told him.  He nodded, pointed to himself and told me his, then offered me his maimed right hand, which I shook.  He didn’t beg.  So after a moment I smiled and told him I hoped he had a good day, then continued my walk to school.

It’s sad to consider what fate the street people face.  With such little food available, trash everywhere around them, and with the crazy driving, I can’t imagine they last long in the streets.  At least a few times I’ve walked past men lying in the street or on a cart.  I suspect they are sleeping but sometimes the way their bodies are arranged suggests otherwise.  And I can only hope they are faring better than the dogs.  Now and again I’ve passed flat patches of what looks like a furry coat that’s been hammered into the ground with constant pressure from car wheels and I wonder if that used to be an animal.  No one bothers to clean it.  Roadkill here simply becomes part of the road. 

And amidst all this you’ll see an Audi or a Mercedes Benz making its way down the road, honking with the same gusto that the rickshaws do.  They only seem out of place to me, I think. No one else even looks at them. 

That, too, is characteristic of this place.  Nothing seems to be given much regard and all it takes is a dismissive tone to put someone or something that is out of line back into place.  Linda, the yogi I met in my hotel, told me that her friend was attacked while walking to the KYM by a crazy-looking three year old girl.  The child had seen Linda and not paid any attention to her.  But Linda’s friend, blonde and fair skinned, drew her attention.  She immediately picked up a stick and ran straight for her, screaming and swinging.  She never hit her but kept threatening to.  Until Linda quickly turned and yelled at her.  She dropped the stick and ran off.

This place is replete with interactions like this.  The city is one big fat contradiction, juxtaposing rich and poor, quiet and loud, pure and filthy, practical and nonsensical without losing its balance.  Wyatt, my friend Holly’s son, referred to this dance as “the ridiculousness of Chennai” because it goes beyond simply strangeness.  It doesn’t seem to make any sense that a place should function this way, that it should be able to accommodate anyone and anything that comes to it, offering just the right level of opportunity, challenge and inconvenience to let it survive.  But it does.  

Tu Naciste Libre

Tu naciste libre.

[You were born free.]

This line came to mind this morning, watching the red sun rise while I stood on the rooftop of the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, leading seven of my “Heart of Yoga” class peers in a modified Primary Series class.

My mother said this to me just before I left for Chennai.  We were discussing my trip, her discomfort with it, and my resolve in making it happen.  She said it with a sad tone to her voice, as if she lamented that fact, then followed it up by saying that even from birth it was clear that nobody was ever going to tell me what to do.

I take some pride in that fact, though I never would’ve phrased it that way.  I don’t consider myself any more free than anyone else.  Or any more bold, for that matter.  I am here because I dislike regret more than I dislike risk.  It is so easy on the mind to be closed to the frightening unknown and to seek security in every moment.  But it weighs so heavy on the soul. 

There were plenty of moments when I wondered if I’d lost my mind in planning this trip.  I remember sitting on the couch in our apartment, looking for hotels and guesthouses near the KYM and suddenly realizing that many of these advertised hot and running water (and that most of the hotels offered an on-call doctor).  I was horrified.  What kind of a place was I going to if hot, running water had to be disclosed as an amenity?  What kind of a place had on-call doctors as a staple?  I called Kevin over specifically to share this bit of information with him.  We’d been discussing whether or not he should join me for part of this trip so that we didn’t spend so much time apart.  He grinned devilishly.  “I’ll miss you,” he said.

That was one of at least three or four moments when I seriously considered calling off the trip.  But I didn’t, because I would still have that yearning to come to India, to study here, and an unfulfilled yearning breeds only regret.  So I just continued to press forward with my plans, trying to arrange what all I could from San Diego to make the trip as bearable as possible.

If I was scared a couple of months before my trip because of what I might be getting into, I was numb as the departure date got closer because of what I was leaving behind.  I’d be away from Kevin, from my friends and from my family whom, despite being a countryside away, I could communicate with multiple times a day when I was in California.

India would change all of that.  It would thrust me into an alien place full of people I didn’t know and didn’t know if I could trust or would even like.  And I would not have the comfort and support of friends or family to share that with.

On my flight here I had to fight back tears a couple of times.

But I firmly believe that it’s facing those fears that then opens you up to opportunity. 

And so this morning I stood on the rooftop of a school established in honor of the man who modernized yoga, brought it to the masses, and demystified it so that it was both practical and accessible for anyone who wanted or needed it.  I’d read about him throughout the 12 years I’d studied yoga, and his commentaries and teachings were my reference point for understanding a practice that can be experienced at so many levels it still manages to surprise me.

I had never planned to be here.  Never even dreamed of it actually.  But after our first two asana practices in class, a number of students discussed wanting to practice together to learn each other’s styles (there are plenty represented in our class) and to have a slightly more athletic asana practice than what our formal class offered. 

So we arranged through the school to be able to use the rooftop at 6a.m.  The staff at the KYM giggled at the notion.  We had just studied how ineffective attachment to strong asana is.  But our teacher had also relayed to us that what a student wants is also integral to the type of practice that should be given to them, whether or not it’s the practice they need.  So they humored us, even though from that point forward they kept asking us if our formal practice was “lame.”  Everyone was curious and enthusiastic about Ashtanga and since I am the only Ashtangi here, I was asked to lead the first morning session the next day. 

I was the first to arrive at the KYM this morning and for a moment considered that it was a real possibility that nobody else would show.  Afterall the streets are a bit intimidating as it is, and would be even more so when it’s dark out and there isn’t the safety of crowds.  During my own walk, I’d encountered more than my share of dark corners, men sleeping on the ground who I didn’t recognize as human until I was right on them, and a pissy little dog that upon seeing me from a half a block away decided to stare me down until I was only three feet away from him, at which point he scurried away.

Within minutes the other students started to arrive, though.  We grabbed mats from the classroom and set them up facing the East (or what we thought was East at the moment since there wasn’t even a glimmer of sunlight when we started).  There was a light breeze and we were starting to hear the characteristic honking that I’ve come to associate with Chennai.  The crows were starting to call out but not fly yet. 

I started to teach. 

Friends who have been to my classes or seen me teach will tell you that I change slightly when I’m in that zone.  It is not unlike practice for me but instead of inward focus, I’m focused on everyone else.  I often get lost in that moment and don’t notice anything else about the environment (I’ve been known to teach students in an uncomfortably hot room without realizing I need to open a window).  Since I was facing the students it wasn’t until the seated postures when I turned around that I realized the sun had come up and that we’d welcomed it into the day with the practice.  I’m not one to ascribe more significance to moments than they deserve, but this was a pretty special one for me.  It was not unlike being on top of the yogic world: greeting the sun with practice from the rooftop of the KYM, arguably one of the most important research centers on the teachings of Yoga.

The Indian sky was a perfect blue, with wispy clouds dispersed throughout it.  The dust of the city hadn’t been kicked up yet by the traffic, but we could hear music playing from below.  Blackbirds flew over us, now and again swooping down close but never landing anywhere.  Sharing this space, this view, with others who’d traveled from so many different places to deepen their study and practice of Yoga... something about it felt right.

They say that if you are inexplicably drawn to the practice of Yoga in this life it is because you were exposed to it in a previous one.  You were born with it, with its taste for freedom, in your very being.

“You were born free.”

Perhaps I was.  Actually, I’d like to think I was.

  

My India Moment

I’ve heard it said many times that you know you will love or hate India the moment you set foot in it.  Some people I’ve spoken to get here and feel like they’ve come home, even though they’ve never been here before.  Others talk about immediately planning their return trip even as their present trip is far from over.  And then there are others who describe India as a terrible place that no one in their right mind would ever visit.  There’s no in between. 

For me this wasn’t the case.  When I arrived, I found a congested and chaotic place.  But I had a purpose here and with that purpose I was willing to suffer any inconveniences that may present themselves… and a number of them did.  I didn’t hate India, but I also didn’t feel any elation upon my arrival.  I was fairly level headed about it.  Being here meant achieving something that for a long time has meant a lot to me.  I didn’t need to worry about how I felt about the place, nor whether I planned to return. 

And then on my third day I had what I will always refer to as my India moment and I knew what side I was on.  As the last of our classes came to end at 6p.m. and all the students quietly filed out of the classroom, I heard the blare of an instrument I didn’t recognize involved in a melody that was equally alien.  I stepped towards the window to see if I could find the source of the sound, but instead I was faced with an orange sky and a burning red sun that hovered just over the horizon.  From the fourth floor window I had a vantage point that I hadn’t experienced yet.  I could see everything, even above the tallest buildings that peaked here and there above the tree canopy that otherwise blanketed the city.  An odd variety of black birds with glistening black feathers except on their ash-colored heads rose and fell in the sky as far into the horizon as I could see, their motion oddly synchronized with the music, whose source was not identifiable and so seemed to come from the city itself.  This moment was only possible here.  In the midst of the filth, the poverty and disorder all it took was to stand back and see the dance of the whole to appreciate that ugly parts can still make something deeply enchanting.  

Getting Here Was the Easy Part

My first experience with the inconveniences of India came as I tried to set up a wireless connection from my room.  The hotel has a “business center,” a term I put in quotes because it amounts to a tiny un-air-conditioned room with one computer and a trash can.  The way the room is set up, the computer desk and chair are aligned along the short of axis of the room, which is short indeed.  A large person could not use this computer because the chair hits the wall behind it almost as soon as it clears the desk.  And that’s without sliding out the keyboard tray, which makes even someone as small as me feel slightly claustrophobic.

Not that I care about any of that.  My real issue is privacy. My sole purpose for using the internet at this point is Skype (www.skype.com), the only way I have to communicate with Kevin and my family.  For those not familiar with it, Skype is a fabulous service that allows free calls (even video calls) between Skype users.  Before leaving the U.S. I had Kevin, my brother and my parents set up on Skype.  They’d be able to see me and we’d be able to chat for as long as we wanted without worrying about cost.  The walls of the business center are thin all around, though, so both the front lobby and the people outside the hotel can hear every word I utter.  That and the business center is shared, so there is no guarantee that I will have access to it or that I will be able to be there for any lengthy period of time before someone else who wants to use it shows up. 

To connect from the room, you need to buy a “quick access card,” which again is in quotes because it’s “quick access” in name only.  You buy the card, which comes with a serial number and a password that you see only after scratching off the coating over it.  Every time I use it I feel like I’m playing the lotto.  When you find the internet access website you realize that you have to enter both these fields into the page, along with your cell phone number and a new password will be sent to your phone.  You then enter this password into the access page and get to re-enter the original serial number and password and THEN you have internet access… for an hour.

I’d had the foresight to have my Verizon phone set up for international roaming before I left the U.S., but the rates are awful.  Sending and receiving texts is about the only reasonable option ($.20 to send and $.05 to receive).  I figured this would be for emergency use only, and in the first days of my stay at that.  I’d brought an additional phone a friend lent me that I could set up to use in India.  Or so I thought.

On Day 1 I went out to try to get a SIM card for my phone and found it very difficult to communicate with anyone about where to do it.  There were plenty of places that seemed to advertise phone services but few of those actually LOOKED like places you’d be able to set up a phone through.  I instead focused on other endeavors.

On Day 2 I decided to ask around and before I left the hotel, mentioned to the doorman that I was looking for a place to buy a SIM card.  He took off his little doorman hat and was out the door with me.  I thought he was going to direct me to the right place and leave it at that but instead he went from place to place trying to figure out for me what I needed.  We hit three places and in the third a very disinterested woman relayed that I needed to have a copy of my passport and a photo to submit to them so they could give me a SIM card.  So off we were trying to find a place to get both.  Thank God he was leading because the guy who would eventually take my photo had to be fished out of a completely different store and dragged upstairs to the studio, a fine little set up with two soft boxes and a selection of backgrounds.

Once I was on the chair, both men urged me to smile for the picture.  The flash went off and when they reviewed the picture (I found it very funny that the doorman was involved in the picture review process, which even I wasn’t privy to) they both grimaced and then urged me to smile without showing teeth.  They clearly did not like my braces.  A second picture was taken and the photographer pulled up Photoshop 7.0 and cleaned off his Epson photo lab.  When he pulled up the two pictures of me, he gestured for me to select one.  Without even looking at me, the doorman jumped up and urged him to use the toothless smile picture.  It was only as an afterthought that he turned to me on the photographer’s urging to get my feedback.  Toothless smile it was.

I have to say here that though the rest of the excursion was a complete bust, I did get a very nice photo of me.

When we left the place, we headed to find a photocopier to make my passport copy.  That place was easy to find.  The word “Xerox” was prominently displayed outside and the room we walked into had nothing but a tiny desk and exactly one copy machine.  The doorman handed my passport to the attendant who quickly made a copy of my information and VISA pages, handed them to the doorman, and then requested 2 Rupees.  My smallest note was 100 Rupees.  The guy shook his head and said “No change.”  The doorman turned to me, shook his head and said “No change.”  I told him this was the smallest bill I had.  So he shrugged, and led me out the door, photocopies in hand, without paying.

We went back to cell phone place but this time there was a very disagreeable man at the counter next to the disinterested woman and he was insistent that I needed Indian ID to be able to get a cell phone.  The doorman, disagreeable man and disinterested woman went back and forth and the woman, whose English was better than anyone else’s there, communicated to me every few minutes the status of the conversation.

It turns out that getting a phone in India is not easy by design.  As a security measure, access to cell phones requires Indian identification (either the person’s or a sponsor’s).  I explained that I was here to study at the KYM and would be here for a month, making a cell phone a handy thing to have, especially since my current internet access was dependent on it.  Remembering from my handy "Culture Shock! India" book that Indians tend to only answer the exact question that is asked, I also mentioned that any venue they could suggest I pursue to get a phone would be useful.  The three consulted each on this and the woman finally told me that I should get proof that I was staying here from the hotel. 

So back to the hotel it was.  At this point I was exhausted.  We’d criss-crossed the nearby streets multiple times trying to resolve this issue and I was losing hope that I would get my cell phone at the end of all this.  At the hotel, the doorman had a discussion with the front desk guy and the front desk guy gave me a receipt for the 5000 Rupee deposit I’d made for the hotel.  Then it was back to the cell phone place, where the disagreeable man essentially said that it wasn’t good enough.  Somewhere in there the doorman offered to put his own name down for me but I’m not sure what happened with that because we didn’t end up doing it.  In some ways I’m glad because he was already going out of his way to help me and I was uncomfortable with him having to vouch for me when he didn’t know me past our greetings at the hotel entrance, which, it was not lost on me, was not being manned this entire time.

We went back to the hotel, where the front desk guy suggested I get some kind of proof from the KYM that I am studying there and have THEM vouch for me to get a cell phone.  I sighed, thanked the two of them, then headed to the business center to contact Kevin to let him know the bad news.  As I went to walk in, I realized there was someone there already.  She was picking up her stuff and ready to leave so I backed off enough to make space.  It was a lady I’d seen before who, by her voice, sounded American.  We greeted each other and I went inside.  Seconds later there’s a knock at the door and the doorman opens and asks me to come with him to the front desk.  The front desk guy looked very animated and he relayed that the lady who had just walked out was also studying at the KYM, that she had a cell phone, and would perhaps be a good resource for me.  Then they gave me her room number. 

India’s formality is clearly selective.

I went back to my room, called the lady’s number and introduced myself.  She laughed, as did I, at how odd this whole situation was, then told me to come down to her room so we could chat.

We spent the next two hours talking and laughing about yoga, India and food.  I told her about my teachers and she talked about hers.  It turned out we had Mark Whitwell in common and that she was a student of Srivatsa Ramaswami’s, whose books I’d discovered via Mark’s recommendation, and remain the best I’ve come across on the topic of yoga.

We finally got to the topic of the phone and she mentioned that the Mumbai attacks had changed a lot of things in India, among them the ease with which someone could get a cell phone.  She has a personal driver who gets the SIM card for her and after that it’s easy enough to buy minutes.  She suggested the whole KYM letter thing would be a bust and that getting someone local to buy a SIM card would be the most effective way to get a phone.  A great suggestion but I don’t know anyone.

So after a long chat and setting up dinner plans for the next day, I left her room certain that I would not resolve the SIM card issue today and willing to brave the charges of international roaming to see if I could at least get an internet connection that way. 

THAT, at least, was successful, if expensive. But it was worth it because it allowed me to show Kevin my room via webcam and to communicate a lot more openly. 

At this point I am on my second “quick access card” and I’ve been turning on my phone only long enough to get the text message with the necessary texted passcode that punctuates the horribly inconvenient process of using the internet here.  

The day was not lost, of course.  At the end of this process I’ve made two new friends: the doorman, who I feel I owe dinner to for his troubles, which were not insignificant, and Linda, the yogi, who I will be having dinner with, and who has given me plenty of tips on how to make it in India.

“Nothing can prepare you for what you’ll find here,” Linda told me.  So far, my experience has proved her right.  Despite the lengthy and painful process of getting a VISA when I am a U.S. citizen who was not U.S. born and who does not use the same name now that is written on my birth certificate, there’s no doubt in my mind that getting here was the easy part.

I'm Here

I remember reading once that upon arriving in India, the senses are assaulted.  That was all I could think of when I walked out of the airport last night and was immediately immersed in all of Chennai’s chaos and strangeness.  The first thing that struck me was the noise.  Car horns never seem to cease here.  Their use is not reserved for the rare circumstance when you have to alert another driver of your unnoticed presence or protest their careless driving.  No.  The drivers here use their horn as a way to demand the right of way from other cars and pedestrians alike.  The horns come so varied and so often that they are sometimes indiscernible in the cacophony and it’s questionable whether they achieve anything at all.

And then there is the smell.  It would be inaccurate to say that the city streets stink.  There is a mix of food, spices, dirt, sweat, exhaust and excrement that somehow manages to be less offensive than it sounds.  It’s simply alien.  And that combination of smells permeates everything and everyone. 

In the midst of the more concrete senses, there’s also the feel of the place, which is probably what I was least prepared for.  It is neither threatening nor welcoming, but something that manages to be the two.  As I walked through the crowd looking for a sign with my name on it signaling that I’d found my cab driver, I realized I was the only non-Indian I could identify.  But rather than stick out awkwardly, I noticed that it was only the odd individual who would even bother to glance at me.  Most people looked far past me, searching for someone they knew perhaps.  They didn’t seem to notice me at all, even as I was headed right towards them, and moved out of my path only as I pressed into them to get through.

After only a couple of minutes I realized I had a shadow on me: a dark skinned Indian man with a stern look who walked uncomfortably close to me.  “Taxi?” he asked.  I told him I someone was supposed to be waiting for me.  “Someone waiting for you?” he repeated.  And even though I confirmed, he stayed right on me, moving alongside me as if we knew each other. 

I had read in “Culture Shock! India,” a book Kevin gave me for Christmas so I could prepare for my trip, that taxi drivers in India are aggressive: they will fight, often with each other, for your business and offer the lowest rate and a reassurance that they know exactly where you’re going.  But once you’re in the cab, all of those agreements go out the window.  I wanted to avoid this as much as possible but the hotel was not going to make it easy for me.  “Where are you going, sir?” he pressed.  So I told him my hotel’s name and when he asked for an address, I pulled out the sheet with the hotel information.  He asked me about three or four questions that I couldn’t easily make out but I generally understood that he wanted to know if I was sure they would be here.  I shrugged.  He pulled out his cell phone and looked at the hotel number then handed me his phone.  The guy who answered was unmoved by my predicament.  He stepped through the situation with me: I was at the Chennai airport, I’d asked them to send me a taxi, I didn’t see anyone here waiting for me. 

“Can you take a taxi, sir?” 

I remembered another line from “Culture Shock! India”:  Indians have a hard time saying “no” and an equally hard time following through on what they agreed to do.  So I just hung up the phone and asked my shadow how much he’d charge for a ride to the hotel.  “Rs 560.”  About $12.  I agreed.

He pushed the cart with my bags through the crowd, across the street and into an area where various taxis were coming through.  We stopped by a car that I initially thought was his but was not.  “Where’s the car?” I asked.  And he blabbed something off that roughly communicated that we were actually waiting for someone with a cab.  I had not been picked up by a taxi driver but rather by a taxi pimp. 

Making conversation with this guy was not easy.  He clearly knew only enough English to fulfill the necessities of his trade.  But he tried anyway.  As we waited, another guy came up to me.  I was clearly standing next to my shadow, who had both hands on the cart with my luggage. “Need a taxi, sir?”  Oh boy, I thought, here we go.  So sure enough, within 10 minutes of landing in Chennai, I’d had two experiences the author of “Culture Shock! India” had warned about: I’d been promised a ride that never showed up and now had two taxi drivers fighting infront of everyone else for my business.  Excuse me, a traxi driver and a taxi pimp.  The shadow won the argument and the new guy walked away.  Soon after a car pulled up with a driver who managed to speak even less English than my shadow.  The taxi pimp said something to him and we were off, then the taxi driver asked me where we were going.  I told him the name of the hotel.  Clearly it’s not a well known hotel because he had no clue what it was, so I pulled out my information sheet again and showed it to him.  He was still not sure.  So I pulled out my hand Chennai map and pointed to where the hotel was.  He nodded and we were off.

At this point I’d lost all confidence that I would get to my hotel in a decent amount of time.  I’d asked the hotel how much time to expect the ride from the airport to take and they’d suggested 30 minutes.  I’ve since learned that Indians would rather give an inaccurate answer than no answer at all.  The taxi managed it in less than 20.  In that time I had my first glimpse of the rampant poverty: trash lay strewn along the sidewalk, women in colorful saris walked barefoot along the filthy street, stray dogs, mostly emaciated, roamed freely, looking for food in the trash piles.  There are cities that, despite their decline, still manage, in their architecture or street art, to offer a glimpse of what they were at their height.  But Chennai offers no such insight.  It’s hard to imagine what this place was like when the streets were not crumbling under the vehicles and the buildings weren’t crumbling around their inhabitants.

When I finally stepped into the hotel I took my first real breath in this country.  The room itself and the hotel in general were not especially impressive, but I was at least where I was supposed to be.  It has the essentials: running hot water, air conditioning, a comfortable bed, windows I can close to shut out the overwhelming amount of stimuli, and the reassurance that I will have these things until I leave a month from now.  In this country that is not something to be taken for granted.

From: India, With Love

On May 18^th, 2009 Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, father of Ashtanga-Vinyasa Yoga, passed away.  I never met him in person but I felt like I knew him.  Every yoga studio I trained at had his photo prominently displayed on the wall.  He had the same mix of tenderness and sternness I see in every grandfather I know.  Men who have lived long enough to know precisely when to be soft and when to be hard.  And then there were the stories, which I heard time and again from my teachers, enough so that they were more like legends and less like memories.  They often came with impersonations that, if not accurate, seemed at least to be consistent across the board.

I am sure I have had many lessons in impermanence in my life, but none have stayed with me the way Patthabhi Jois’ death did.  I am drawn to yoga for partly practical and partly mystical reasons.  The latter I rarely talk about because I think most people would not care to hear about them, and, if they did, I’m not certain I could articulate them well enough anyway.  I was drawn to Jois in much the same way.  Part natural curiosity and part inexplicable drive, perhaps an attraction via the link of his teacher-student lineage (parampara in Sanskrit) that I was now a part of.  And, though it cannot be compared to the deeply personal loss that his long time students, friends and family faced when he passed, something for me changed in that moment.  Two opportunities to meet Jois passed me by with the reassurance that there would be yet another chance.  In life, sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t.

Among that flurry of activity as my teachers readied for their trip to India to attend Jois’ funeral and navigated the logistics of finding the right substitutes for certain classes… in that empty space created by the loss of a guru and the departure of my own teachers whose council I’d come to count on almost daily, the resolve for this trip was born.  No more excuses.  

Though my practice for the last ten years has focused on Ashtanga-Vinyasa, I’ve been blessed to have teachers that had been trained in other styles, namely Viniyoga and Iyengar.  These are sister styles to Ashtanga, born of the same source (Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya), though promoted through different teachers.  Viniyoga, in particular, is dear to my heart, as have been the teachers that exposed me to it.  Where Ashtanga gave me technique and discipline, Viniyoga gave me a context and purpose for them. 

The class I’ll be attending is titled “The Heart of Yoga,” a symbolic title for me since, in one way or another, that is precisely what I’m after.  As has been true of my yoga practice all these years, I have no idea what I’ll find.  I can only pursue the drive to look.  There have been moments when I’ve been afraid, and when I’ve questioned both my motivations and sanity in doing something like this in such a foreign place for what seems like such a long stretch of time.  I fear as much what I’ll be away from as what I’ll be exposed to.  But facing that fear, I think, is my yoga right now.

When my teachers returned from India after Jois’ funeral, there were endless stories about both the specifics of the funeral and the oddity that is India in general.  I loved hearing all of it in part because it was the last remnants I had of that lost opportunity and in part because I already knew I would be in that exotic place they were describing very soon.  There was a feeling in me that I can only describe as a deep sense of gratitude in those days.  Gratitude for what all my teachers had offered me up to that moment, for the time and effort they had spent learning these techniques and this philosophy from their own teachers, for the wisdom of the learnings themselves, and for the way God plants these seeds that seem to bloom at just the right time. I felt like some small transformation had taken place inside me.  I was seeing things differently and I knew that every person and event leading up to that moment, when I’d decided to set aside my apprehension about traveling to India, was an offering of sorts, and one for which I should feel deeply thankful.

A few days after my teachers returned from that trip, I went to open the studio in the morning for Mysore practice and found a small bag behind the desk in the greeting area.  It was a gift from my teachers from their trip: a deck of cards, each with a quote of Vedic knowledge.  What drew me most, though, was the small tag made of brown recycled paper on the bag’s handle.  What it said may as well have referred to (and perhaps in some way it did) what I had felt in the previous days.  Adorned with three bindi jewels, it simply read “To: Oreste, From: India, With Love”