Red Light New Light

These words rang true today.  I rolled my yoga mat out.  Smiling at paying 650 rupees ($9) for a room just to have space to practice, when in the past I would have paid about 200 rupees ($2.50) and woke up before dawn to practice on the roof before the neighbors would become my uninvited audience.  Inside space would have seemed luxury years before - extravagant even. Yet here I listen to volunteers argue over 2 rupees “out of principle” and yet I watch as they also throw money at the beggars and the cheats – not being able to distinguish between the two.  It is almost like I walk around seeing more than what first appears.  I observe a parallel narrative to everything, and at times I wish I could switch it off, or at least turn the volume down.   I blame it on my rigorous training in Development Studies paired with my Mayan sign of the Blue Spectral Night.  Ha!

I took the metro to Kalighat, ignored the persistent shouts by many men that I was walking in the wrong direction to the Kali temple as I side stepped the pilgrims and slid down an ally way.  A familiar street, lined with tiny rooms, women squatting on the corners and others taking care of business behind drawn curtains. There’s no red lights here, no women in scanty clothes, they just tend to wear brighter saris, perhaps have more tattoos.  For the uninitiated it could appear to be just another street.  After all husbands are around, kids play in the open doorways, it’s the middle of the day.   I walk into a house, up the stairs and into New Light.  The organization I volunteered for on and off between 2008-2010.  I received hugs and smiles from young women I had once taught yoga to and who had now graduated from student to staff.  The ngo was perhaps the only one which ever gave me any hope.  It provides a play school for the kids to go while their mothers are working, after school tuition to both educate and occupy kids during busier evening “working hours”.  They have a safe house for teenage girls, which is in a respectable part of town, where mothers wouldn’t be tempted to sell their daughters, and customers wouldn’t be tempted to try to buy them.  They also have a centre for young women who have finished school and are now at college.  The intention is that they have a start in life, providing them with experiences, education, support and motivation to find a different profession from the one they were born into.  And its appears to be working. 

The whole reason why I am back in Kolkata is because of New Light.  Urmi Basu (the founder and force behind the ngo) said she had some ideas about work we can do together.  No details were shared, although I imagine it will be working with the daughters of the sex workers.  Of course I already see the challenges – that they need to study, they have a full schedule, my lack of Bengali, the irony that I am in India and potentially teaching yoga.  This later point is one which I spent the night debating about with a local friend, who like me sees more than what first meets the eye.  After all he has a restaurant which is a hub for the volunteers on Sudder Street.  He sees people from all over the world come to help, come to take, come to talk.  Some with huge hearts, some with huge egos.  He wonders why they come.  Why they really come…

So later he asks me to teach him yoga.  He says perhaps because his skin is brown and he is from India he can become a Guru and become very rich. And then laughs at his pious integrity that in his view limits him to making a decent living a decent way.  Even so, he corrects my Sanskrit, complains about “white people yoga”(which of course “is all about stretching and nothing about liberation”) and meanwhile, his father (oblivious to our conversation) is sitting on top of one of the dining tables (which double as beds after the customers have gone home) practicing nadi shodana (alternate nostril breath).  With increasing frequencies I am the one feeling like a fraud.  And I don’t mean because I am teaching yoga and not Indian, but because there is indeed so much to yoga, and the more I learn the less I know.  There is no one religion, culture, language, narrative in India, and the same thing goes for yoga.  I often want to just string together a chronological time line of yoga History, read the main themes of yoga philosophy.  And yet of course there is no one history, no one philosophy. Perhaps this is modern yoga has become so simplified?  Yet the more I continue to study, the more dissatisfied I become with what the yoga industry is selling. And this ties back in to why I am here right now…the origin of yoga as being one of connection to truth, to liberation, to an inner journey of radical self transformation.  And how potent a tool that can be for all of us, especially for those living in conditions that demand a super human amount of resilience.  I even think of it on a personal level – and I don’t just mean the importance which I put on my morning practice, but on actually being here now.  On putting myself in different positions (places which don’t fill me with joy or inspiration) and just observe how I respond to them.  Not resisting, not trying to escape, but tapering my reaction until I arrive at an appropriate response.  The journey into different cultures and comfortable situations happens on both the physical and spiritual plane.  Yet it is often the journey within which is rich in unexpected treasures, which could be found only as a result of the challenges on the physical plane.  Moreover these treasures might only reveal themselves days, months or years later but are a direct result of the challenging experiences embodied.  Adaptability; it is after all a seed of evolution.