UPLOADING THE ASANA

With Covid having forced yoga practitioners to rely on social media and online tutorials, this year’s National Yoga Day will first be celebrated on Zoom and Instagram

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Few yoga studios are as familiar as Anshuka Parwani’s in Bandra, Mumbai. A reliable celebrity-spotting location, paparazzi hover outside its gate to click the entry and exit of actresses like Kareena Kapoor Khan, Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt and Ananya Panday, to name a few. Parwani’s high-profile clientele is one of the reasons she is among the most popular yoga practitioners on Instagram with over 152,000 followers. Another draw is her eclectic approach to fitness: offering everything from ashtanga yoga and yogalates (a combination of yoga and pilates) to “fly fit”, a suspension fitness practice which, she says, takes the “yumminess” of three fitness genres—aerial yoga, aerial pilates and aerial fitness. Of late, due to the lockdown, there has been little activity outside the studio, but Parwani’s business is flourishing online.

“I have been working overtime [through] the last year,” says Parwani, who has seen her enterprise expand to the US and the UK. “My eyes are strained as I try to look at each posture.” The Covid-19 pandemic, she adds, has seen a huge surge in demand. Private companies, for instance, are asking Parwani to train their employees in breath training in an effort to keep them healthy. As India battled a more pernicious second wave and doctors recommended breathing exercises like