Yoga isn’t for everyone

The only reason I did not put Lucy Edge’s book Yoga School Drop-out down was because I was asked to review it. It starts out as a fluffy chick-lit book, trying to make us laugh a la Bridget Jones’ Diary (by Helen Fielding). But Jones keeps us in splits throughout because mostly she is laughing at herself. Edge fails to keep us humored since right after the first few chapters her comic repertoire dries up, sounding labored: She begins (or tries) to laugh at others '- not always such a good idea, since she starts sounding crabby and mean rather than funny.

She gets into some heavy-duty cribbing about all yoga schools, then loses her script again whenever she decides to lecture us on yoga concepts, gurus, Sanskrit terms, the different schools or whatever else that she may have otherwise put down and away as foot notes.

It seems she just cannot make her mind if her book is to be a travelogue, a yoga shoppers’ guide, a yoga directory, comic caper, spiritual adventure, or   lengthy crib session with some enlightenment thrown in as an after-thought.  In the last few pages, five to be exact, enlightenment finally dawns on this girl. But the book would have made an interesting read if what got chucked and crammed in these few five pages — her insight — shimmered through the rest of her experiences in the yoga mind space of India.

That would have given her book a multi-dimensional appeal. That may even have given her attempt at humor another leverage, even an edge that may have kept us doubled up. The way it reads now I can’t imagine who would enjoy wading through her experiences except other cribbers with bigger blinkers, blind to the underlying message at some of the yoga schools and the search of these ’self-obsessed’ yoga freaks that the lady has so blithely trashed.
 
And I don’t know about her complacent title either -' she sets out shopping for yoga, so when did she turn into a student? And, if she can crib endlessly, why can’t I?

It seems the only Indians the lady has met during her five months are those who speak pidgin English. An Indian, for instance, who cannot find the right word for headstand and says he does ‘upside downing’ regularly. And the Indian couple outside the Maharishi cave saying things like “Much heat happening. I cannot be standing it.”

C’mon Edge, don’t you know we Indians have been slaves for so long that we speak the lingo better than that? Were you too busy trying to snare a white dude (whom you could not find back home, as you confess) that you did not have time to explore the real India?

Of course dear, there are rats in the ashrams and roaches too. And every bed at such places is hard as concrete. Of course, the politicking at such places is more vicious and venomous than what our experienced politicians can stew up. Of course, some of these yoga schools are pretenders, and are commercial establishments that are masquerading as spiritual havens. But most yoga trekkers already know all that.

Still, some of us do keep returning to these places for something else '- that something that struck you in the last five pages of your book. So, if you rewrote the book, say after a few years after those five pages of wisdom sunk into you, and you re-track your steps through these spots radiating this wisdom, I bet your book would be paisa vasool (which, in English, would mean worth the money spent on it).

Edge has got it right with the pure spiritual throb at the Sivananda Vedanta Yoga Center (off Trivandrum) at Kerala, and the Ramana Maharishi ashram at Arunachal (Tamil Nadu). Yes, she got it right about the capacity of the same simple Indians to ‘celebrate the ordinary’. And yes, right too, about the Indian male strutting, be it at an ashram reception or as tourist car drivers. And yes, her book could be a perfect, even useful, guide for yoga shoppers, the sort who wish to find out all about roaches, unshapely Indian yoga teachers, hard beds, commercial rackets, politics and rest of the mood at such yoga schools.
Though as such guides go, I would highly recommend Anne Cushman’s From here to Nirvana – a more practical, hands-on, and honest directory and guide which does not find the need to drape itself over a pretentious novel.

– Yoga School Drop-out, Lucy Edge, Ebury Press, 341 pages.
– Review by Shameem Akthar, yoga instructor and columnist.