Yuva Bharati - June 2018

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The announcement of June 21st as the International day of Yoga has accelerated the growth of popularity of this age old Indic Spiritual Practice. That day is celebrated with lot of people practicing Yoga Asanas and Meditation. In many of the countries it is a state sponsored celebration, thus getting much wider attention and coverage. With this increased popularity comes another danger. Off late there are louder voices which deny that it is a Indic spiritual practice and many of them claim that this is non-religious and thus has nothing to do with Hinduism. While it is important to counter these claims, it is also pertinent to know the root cause of such claims. The imperial powers which were ruling us during the last century are not able to digest the fact that this wonderful wisdom which is actually a panacea for many of the modern day problems actually belong to a country which was enslaved by them. Though the imperial powers are no longer in the ruling seat, their new avatar the modern market driven capitalist countries are having the same kind of malice towards anything Hindu. There are other misconceptions too about the practice of yoga which includes that it a mere physical exercise, a cure for all physical problems etc. But more than these misconceptions the first claim is the one which has to be countered as it tries to rob the intellectual property of India. Yoga's appropriation is yet another example of America and the West's racism and dominance over the world. Renowned writer Koenraad writes about this vexing problem thus, "...Naive readers may not have noticed it yet, but here we are dealing with an instance of a widespread phenomenon: the crass manipulation of the term “Hindu”. Every missionary and every secularist does it all the time: calling a thing “Hindu” when it is considered bad, but something (really anything) else as soon as it is deemed good. Many Hindus even lap it up: it is “instilled, albeit inadvertently.”