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Reuters News Service

Tuesday September 2, 10:32 AM

Meet a flamboyant Indian yoga teacher who mesmerised U.S.

By Vasantha Arora, Reuters, Indo-Asian News Service

Washington, Sep 2 (IANS) He is flamboyant and controversial, but Kolkata native Bikram Choudhury can easily be credited as a pioneer of yoga in the U.S.

He began teaching yoga in California in the early 1970s. And today the proliferation of his Bikram studios around the country is an example of yoga's booming popularity.

Today yoga is not only recognised as a means for total fitness but also as a modern practice that can bring peace to body, mind and spirit.

Nationally, it's been estimated that nearly 18 million people in the U.S. take some kind of yoga class, up from seven million in 1998, according to Yoga Journal magazine.

Choudhury seems to make no bones about the fact that his aggressive marketing and promotion have helped him to live in fancy houses and drive expensive cars.

"I live like a king," he told the Portland Oregonian, a news magazine published from Oregon, earlier this year. "Why not? What's wrong with that?"

But, according to some, Choudhury's aggressive business approach is pulling yoga away from its spiritual roots, toward mass marketing.

Articles in magazines such as Yoga Journal have questioned whether Choudhury is more a showman than teacher, more a salesman than guru.

But the real issue isn't Choudhury himself, says Patricia Townsend, a teacher at a Yoga Centre in Amherst, Massachusetts, who has high praise for the abilities of yoga instructors who practice his method.

As yoga has gone increasingly mainstream, it inevitably has taken on the less savoury aspects of American life, she said.

As the back and forth about the politics of yoga goes on, Anemone Guenther and Karen O'Neil of Noho Yoga Centre, Massachusetts, say they are simply trying to offer their students the type of yoga they have both come to love, according to a report in the Gazzettenet.com, a website on health news. Guenther gave up an office job for yoga.

Both of them now own and operate a yoga studio in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

With their yoga mats in hand and bottles of water at the ready, each person pays $12 to spend 90 minutes doing a series of 26 yoga postures - and sweating profusely.

It's a scene being duplicated in several hundred studios in the United States now offering Bikram yoga. Of those, 13 are in Massachusetts, with three more coming.

Choudhury is the founder of the worldwide California-based Yoga College of India.

Born in 1946, he began yoga at the age of four with Bishnu Ghosh, brother of Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self Realisation Fellowship in Los Angeles.

He practised yoga 4 to 6 hours a day at Ghosh's College of Physical Education in Kolkata and at the age of 13 he won the National India Yoga contest. He was undefeated for three years.

At 17, an injury to his knee during a weight-lifting accident brought the prediction from leading European doctors that he would never walk again. Not accepting their pronouncement, he had himself carried back to Ghosh's school.

Six months later, his knee had totally recovered. Choudhury was asked by Ghosh to start several yoga schools in India. There Choudhury came into his own. The schools were so successful that at Ghosh's request he travelled to Japan and opened two more.

He has since brought his curative methods of yoga therapy around the world. His wife Rajashree also teaches with him.

In Bikram yoga, the teacher doesn't do the postures, but talks the class through the sequence of breathing exercises and 24 positions.

Choudhury, who has copyrighted his method, claims it is the way they are put together in a choreographed sequence that separates his classes from others.

The Choudhurys are planning a huge event -- a Yoga Expo -- at the Los Angeles Convention Centre later this month to celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of their guru Bishnu Ghosh.