Jaggi Vasudev prostituting yoga in the world of nations

In a disgraceful talk to the UN, Jaggi Vasudev said “The significant aspect of my personal work has been to remove all the frills of culture that yoga had acquired through this millennia of transmission”. He went on to add that “This is important in an environment where there were people of different nationalities, beliefs and ideologies”. “Yes, it originated in India,” he told a multinational audience of diplomats and international officials. “As Indians we are proud of it. But it does not belong to India. The very fact that the UN has declared an International Yoga Day means India has gifted it to the world. It does not belong to India any more. It is very very important that yoga is brought as a proper science, not as a cultural thing, not as an Indian thing.”

This IS digestion of Hinduism at it’s worst. Where one culture is removed of all its precious contributions and assimilated by another culture. See this video where Rajiv Malhotra explains this concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjh…. By removing the health and mental benefits of Yoga and incorporating them into Christianity and Atheism and whoever else wants a piece, Jaggi Vasudev is secularizing the contributions of Hindu Saints and finally rejecting the culture and the religion that created it by calling it as a “frill”. Sickular Gurus like Jaggi Vasudev are the worst dangers to Hinduism.

This is nothing short of prostitution of Yoga. Removing all the culture from Yoga is nothing short of stripping all the clothing from your mother so that you can sell her. Harsh as it may sound, that is exactly what is happening here.

Hinduism has never been shy of sharing the fruits of its discoveries. The fruits are available for everyone to enjoy. But here Mr Vasudev is cutting the very roots and selling them. Many other technologies from India such as language itself, decimal mathematics, logic, medicine and so on have already been stolen and assimilated and then used to attack the very country that generated all these inventions by attributing all the work to the “Greek and Roman” civilizations. Yoga “accidentally” escaped such a life of slavery. But Jaggi’s life work – he claims in his speech – is to correct this “anomaly”.

Yoga has to be made into a proper science claims Jaggi. But to make something a science we only need to validate it’s claims methodically. We need to make it verifiable and reproducible. You don’t have to remove things and strip it of its art and beauty to do that.

Related : Yoga @ Brand India

Jaggi Vasudev in another talk said that Yoga is like Gravity and no one can claim it. And he said “if yoga is Hindu, then gravity is Christian”. But that is an out rightly silly analogy. Gravity is a force of nature. Yoga is an invention. It is a collection of techniques perfected over millennia. It does belong to the country that created and contributed to it. Just like geographic identification is given to champagne and other products like Neem, Yoga cannot be taken from its Indian origins. This is nothing short of stealing and appropriating the hard work of millions of sadhus and Rishis of this country over countless generations.

While stealing and secularizing Yoga allows Gurus like Jaggi Vasudev to make a fast buck by selling Yoga to foreign cultures, it has a detrimental long term impact on India and Hinduism.

Yoga IS Indian. Yoga IS Hindu. Anyone who claims otherwise is a criminal and a pimp. Everyone who has a shred of patriotism towards their motherland or their religion should OPENLY condemn such outright theft before Yoga goes the route of language, mathematics, logic and other great stolen Indian contributions.

I have seen Jaggi Vasudev’s endorsement of Rajiv Malhotra’s Being Different on his site http://rajivmalhotra.com/jaggi-vasudevs-letter/. But be warned that while he gives lip service to his book, his entire work (as he claimed in his talk yesterday) is completely opposite to its cause. It is very important, I feel, that we should call his hypocrisy publicly and unambiguously. Given the limelight he has been gathering, it is a matter of extreme urgency.