Andhra Pradesh - Hyderabad

Yoga is the ‘cool’ new fad, say fitness buffs Health & Lifestyle

— Photo: K. Ramesh Babu

Stress buster: Participants at a yoga training centre in Hyderabad.

HYDERABAD: For Hyderabadis crash diets, sauna belts and fat loss pills are redundant and ‘uncool’. The latest craze in war against ‘bulge’ is yoga. While many practice yoga to prevent diseases, others are practising this ancient Indian discipline to gain a figure that would leave others awestruck.

K. Yashoda, a call centre employee took up yoga to lose weight.

“I tried everything from aerobics to lifting weights to crash diets and finally took up yoga,” she says. Parvinder Kaur, a yoga trainer, feels that youngsters lack the patience that yoga requires.

“They want to see results instantly which are not possible. Yoga requires perseverance and discipline, which the youth lacks,” she says.

The increasing stress levels amongst students and young executives is another factor for the increased demand, feel yoga masters in the city.

For others like K. Nischala (name changed), a student, learning yoga is ‘cool’.

“When I tell my friends that I am learning yoga, they think its cool.” she says. Acharya Vedpal of Arya Yoga Academy feels that the ‘cool’ tag of yoga has made it palatable for youngsters who otherwise want an easy way out.

However, with increasing demand for yoga teachers, the discipline too has fallen victim to commercialisation. “Every other person who learns yoga for a month is now setting up his/her own yoga centre in the city,” says K.V.S. Swarajya Lakshmi of P. Tirumala Rao Institute of Yoga and Human Empowerment.

Vedpal says that number of IT professionals and students taking up yoga has increased significantly.

“Often many IT professionals take up yoga to decrease weight or for specific health reasons like back pain.” However others like C. Phani Kumar, director, Lakshmi Institute of Yoga and Integrated Health however, attributes this sudden interest in yoga to westernisation.

“Yoga is an age old art, however interest was generated in the recent past only after the Westerners gave it importance,” he says.

He says that there is more to yoga than just physical fitness, an opinion mirrored by Swarajya Lakshmi who says that that though awareness has gone up, the determination to make yoga a way of life hasn’t.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu