The beginner’s guide to yoga

Yoga can change your life, but only if you don’t rush headlong into it. Finding the right instructor is most crucial.

While yoga is being marketed globally for its therapeutic and holistic benefits after two high-profile celebrations of the International Day of Yoga, it’s start-up problems that bedevil new enthusiasts of the ancient practice. With so many forms and interpretations in currency, it’s not always easy finding the right yoga instructor. “I like to use the analogy of the blindfolded men trying to identify an elephant,” says Vasant Jajoo, who blends therapeutic elements of the Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana with the form popularised by B.K.S. Iyengar, at his studio in Bengaluru.

Over time, yoga inculcates mindfulness and awareness. As Mr. Jajoo says, “In its entirety, yoga is a way of life that will slowly change the way you perceive the world.” But first, you need to find a teacher who can guide you on this path.

1. Discuss your goals: “Beginners should not get bogged down by the different schools of yoga, but should concentrate on finding an experienced teacher who can guide them on this journey,” says Mr. Jajoo, who has been teaching and practising yoga for nearly15 years. He suggests word of mouth over apps that promise to send a teacher to your doorstep. “Don’t hesitate to get reviews from existing students. Discuss your goals and expectations, so that everyone is on the same page.”

Anjali Thomas

2. Weight loss is incidental: Be wary of those who tout yoga as the answer to diabetes and a cure for other illnesses or, use the practice as a weight-loss tool. “Losing weight is incidental,” says Syamla Monie, who trained at The Yoga Institute in Mumbai, which was founded in 1918 and focusses on classical yoga. Ms. Monie has been practising “classical householder’s yoga” in Mumbai for 20 years and shows her students how to integrate the practice with day-to-day activities. “Yoga is not about showing off your headstand or contorting your body. The instructor should be for the well-being of his or her students. Only if people devote time to their physical and mental health can they take care of their family,” she says.

3. Don’t hide your health problems: The relationship between an instructor and a student is one that is built on honesty, much like a doctor or a patient. Mr. Jajoo advises people to discuss their health problems. For instance, if you have a bad knee or a weak back or are prone to migraines, you should tell your teacher in advance. Some asanas can provide relief; others can exacerbate the problem. He gives the example of shirshasana or the headstand. “A trained yoga therapist will know that a student with cervical spondylosis should not be allowed to attempt shirshasana. But the asana is known to help people prone to migraines. A yoga therapist should be able to modify an asana to suit a person’s needs.”

4. Go slow: Hatha yoga practitioner Ratna V. does not introduce new students to complicated series such as the surya namaskar, which has at least 12 steps, immediately. “Students have to learn how to hold each posture correctly, and the right breathing techniques. Even in a group class, a teacher should be able to spot a student who is struggling with a pose and correct them gently,” she says.

5. Do not ignore meditation and pranayama: Pranayama exercises your lungs, helps you become more aware of your body and is a vital part of yoga. Here, too, teachers should exercise caution. Some of the breathing exercises should not be taught to beginners or people recovering from a laparoscopy or other surgeries, say experts.

anjali.thomas@thehindu.co.in

Keywords: Yoga, International Yoga Day, Hatha Yoga

Source: The Hindu, 27-06-2016

Crafting the joyless university

A public audit of the UGC’s functioning is required before it can do further damage to higher education.

One phase of a long-standing stand-off between the University Grants Commission (UGC) and a section of our university teachers appears to have ended on June 16. As reported in the press, on that day the Government of India announced that it was acceding to all but one of their demands on the rules governing their functioning. Some peace would have been bought no doubt, but it cannot really further the principle that at the end of the day, after everyone’s rights and responsibilities have been granted and codified, the experience of the university must be a joyful one for our youth. There is some reason to believe that it is not always so in India today, and this is a pity.

Hours of contention

There are three components to the UGC’s package governing the faculty. Of these, mostly two have proved to be bones of contention between the two parties. These have to do with the mandated workload for teachers and student evaluation of courses, including of the lecturer herself. But it is the third component that needs to be scrutinised for its suitability. This is the assessment of teacher performance on a range of activities, ideally centred on research, or what laypersons would recognise as the contribution made to the stock of our knowledge. As a measure of faculty performance, the UGC has devised the Academic Performance Indicator (API), which is the score the teacher has attained in all activities combined.

Pulapre Balakrishnan

On the workload, having attempted to increase it by 25 per cent via a notification issued on May 10, the UGC has now climbed down and restored status quo, whereby a teacher has to undertake 16 Direct Teaching Hours a week. This may not appear particularly strenuous to the public, who are used to a 40 hour week! However, they may not be taking into account that every hour of lecturing, or even discussion, requires several hours of reading and preparation, these two being distinct tasks.

So how are we to arrive at what is a reasonable workload for our university teachers? I would have thought that it is obvious that in this globalised world of knowledge production, one approach would be to seek to approximate the global norm. Were we to do that, we would notice immediately that India’s college teachers have to teach far too much. They teach more hours per week and for more weeks in the year than their counterparts, at least in the anglophone world. I shall explain how I arrive at this conclusion but first draw attention to the fact that with so much of teaching to do, they are left with little time to read for their classes, which directly impinges upon the quality of the lectures students receive.

This is as far as the dissemination of knowledge is concerned. We are yet to address the creation of knowledge. It is not only that a heavy load of teaching crowds out the time left for research, but too much of teaching deadens the intellect which requires leisure and solitude to flourish. So while the UGC’s decision to not increase the workload may appear conciliatory, it must not lead us to overlook the possibility that the existing work norm itself may be unacceptably high.

A constructive suggestion is made here. Instead of approaching the problem from the perspective of a mandatory number of teaching hours, it could be viewed within a framework that starts out by setting the number of courses a teacher must teach in a year. The global benchmark is four courses, two being taught in each of the two semesters. Nevertheless, this would yet leave open the issue of the number of hours of lecture per course. Again, globally, the norm would be no more that 40 hours per course. I understand that in some universities in India it is as much as 60 hours per course, no doubt determined by the number of hours lecturers must teach per year. This approach has the consequence that students are now forced to attend far too many lectures.

As with teachers, so to for the students, too many lecture hours can be a disaster. Passive participation kills all creativity as there is no responsibility imposed on the student to engage. The student’s misery is compounded when the quality of lecturing is poor. The answer to both overworked teachers and deadened students is to drastically reduce the lecture hours. Back-of-the-envelope calculation based on the proposal that a teacher does four courses of 40 hours each in a year shows that India’s teachers, under present UGC norms, are teaching approximately a 100 per cent more than their peers. The consequence of this for the quality of our universities can be imagined.

On constant evaluation

The second of the bones of contention between the UGC and the teachers concerns student evaluation of courses. Surely students must be given the opportunity to assess the instruction they receive, in particular the quality of lectures. While there is scope for immaturity here, the answer to this is to take the evaluations with a pinch of salt, not to scrap them. The university needs to know how the courses that it offers are perceived so that course correction is possible. There is no substitute for student evaluation here. Teachers must learn to treat this as part of give and take. There is no professional or ethical ground on which they can refuse to stand up and be evaluated by their students. The UGC is right to recommend student evaluation of courses, even though we may argue over the metrics.

Finally, the third aspect of governance of our universities by the UGC. The government’s statement of June 16 makes no mention of it, though it is the most controversial component. Represented by the API, this prescribes minimum scores to be attained before a teacher can be considered for promotion. Mainly two elements are involved. One is the specification of a mandatory number of years to be spent in each category, between Assistant and full Professor, and the other is the assessment of research.

Both are problematic. There is absolutely no reason why the number of years of experience in a post should be a consideration in assessing a teacher’s intellectual progress. Things had been done differently in India in the last century. C.V. Raman came into the university from government and Amartya Sen had been made a full professor when he was all of 23 years. They went on to win Nobel Prizes.

Rule by numbers

The least credible part of the API is the scoring of research. Scores are to be given to publications according to the journal in which they have been published, based on a schedule to be notified by the UGC. I had written in these pages, as soon as the present government was installed, why this is problematic and shall not repeat myself but state the reasoning proposed then. Evaluating articles by the journals in which they are published prejudges their intrinsic worth by privileging the prestige of the journal over the quality of the article. Even though it is a reasonable conjecture that prestigious journals use high standards when publishing articles, it is not always the case that less prestigious journals do not contain very good work. The same goes for the UGC’s privileging of “international” over the merely “national” journals. Finally, the API awards marks for projects undertaken, correlated with the money value of the grant amount. It encourages a form of academic entrepreneurship divorced from the pursuit of knowledge. All in all, the UGC’s “rule by numbers”, as the anthropologist U. Kalpagam has characterised governmentality in colonial India, has turned the university into a space in which teachers chase numerical targets to survive. The resulting neurosis cannot but spill over to the students.

For a full half-century India’s hapless public have faced a continuing deterioration of our higher education system. The blame must be laid squarely at the door of the UGC, which has all along enjoyed unbridled power in the regulation of the universities with scant accountability. Its small-mindedness has succeeded in turning the Indian university into a wasteland, and it has got away with it. The irony is that while the Commission pressurises the universities to maintain standards by submitting themselves to rating, should its own record as regulator be assessed, it is unlikely to cover itself in glory. A public audit of the functioning of the UGC is required before it can do further damage.

Pulapre Balakrishnan teaches economics at Ashoka University. He is currently Visiting Professor, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. The views are personal.

Keywords: UGC, University Grants Commission, University teachers, Delhi University

Source: The Hindu, 27-06-2016

‘Draft’ national forest policy: Good riddance to bad rubbish

A week after the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) put out a document on its website titled ‘National Forest policy, 2016 (Draft): Empowered Communities, Healthy Ecosystems, Happy Nation’, a senior ministry official last week said the document is only a “study” done by Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal, and not a draft policy. The preface to the document, however, said it had been prepared “based on village-level focus group discussions, regional and national level consultations, inputs from various stakeholders and analysis of primary and secondary data sets carried out during the years 2015 and 2016”. In fact, nowhere in the document has it been mentioned that the document should be treated as an input for a new forest policy.

What made the ministry suddenly change its stand on the document? Several civil society organisations have been extremely critical of the ‘draft’ mainly because it proposed to dilute the Forests Rights Act (FRA), do away with requirement of having two-third geographical area of mountainous and hill regions under forests, and for allowing industry to have commercial plantations on the forest land. Not only civil society, media reports suggested that even the Union tribal affairs ministry is unhappy with the proposed dilution of the FRA. The criticisms are not entirely misplaced: If a critical policy like the forest policy ignores FRA, combined with the Centre’s other steps — funneling huge amounts of money through Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority to forest officials, bypassing consent for diversion of forest land, instituting forest ‘rules’ to undercut community management, it shows that the aim is to increase the power of the forest bureaucracy and keep local communities out of the decision-making process.

While devising a new policy, the ministry must not only focus on increasing the forest area and bettering the quality of the forests but also ensure that the connection between forest-dependent communities and forests is not lost. The crux of the problem in India’s existing forest policy — the Forest Policy of 1988 — has been that it made the forest department the manager of the forests and the people lost their rights over it. But as the Uttarakhand forest fires showed recently, a few hundred forest officials and a few thousand employees of the department can do nothing when a calamity strikes. They need community support in such emergencies.

Savouring the Moment

K P SHASHIDHARAN





In the hurly-burly of life, many of us forget to live mindfully .We find that our mind is more preoccupied with emotions, feelings, thoughts, aspirations, the past and future, rather than engage with the present.Life, despite its myriad distractions, escapisms, obsessions and passions, makes us feel lonely even when we're among loved ones. There is an underlying feeling of void, a sense of helplessness. We are haunted, for example, by the process of ageing, by what we perceive as impermanence of goodness, and by pain, distress, disease and the thought of death. That's why Buddha talks about `dukha' as the essence of life, not a pessimistic perception, but the reality of life.
Mindfulness meditation enables us to live life mindfully , with awareness of the present to realise the true worth of our being. Mindfulness begins when we stop talking: being silent both inside and outside.We witness thoughts and ideas come and go like uninvited guests in mind waves. Can we listen to the silent song of our soul that is powerful enough to elevate us, taking us closer to Supreme Consciousness? It has power to inspire, and instil in us the true joy of living.
Be quiet first, sit straight, focus on incoming and outgoing breath, and follow and become the flow of air that you inhale and exhale. Keep body , mind and intellect fine-tuned in the present. Enjoy breathing in and out. Let your body be fully energised, and be fully aware of what is going on, effortlessly, like a witness, but mindfully .

Students prefer English in UPSC exams

The number of students writing the UPSC mains exam in English has been disproportionately high over the last few years compared to that in the past, analysis of UPSC data from 2009 to 2014 show.

Data was compiled from annual reports of UPSC by public information portal ‘Factly’, which they shared with The Hindu.

A significant jump was seen in the year 2011 when 83 per cent candidates took the mains exam in English compared to around 62 per cent in 2009. Corresponding to that, Hindi saw a steep decline – a drop of around 20 percentage points from 36 per cent in 2010 to 15 per cent in 2011.

This sudden change coincides with the introduction of the CSAT examination in UPSC prelims in 2011. This change was opposed by many, as it was argued that the new pattern was biased in favor of English-speaking students.

Note that data on the language chosen by candidates to write prelims is not available which makes it difficult to establish whether the jump is indeed indicative of a bias or if that is a consequence of more students taking the prelims exam in English.

Yogendra Yadav, founder of Swaraj Abhiyan and finds this trend concerning. Speaking with The Hindu, he said, “In India, language is one of the most significant markers of social inequality. Much of the social dominance is translated into language. The language of dominance – English – is now the dominant language and it is shocking to see this reverse in trend.”

Mr. Yadav says that students coming to bureaucracy from Indian language medium bring along certain sensitivity and understanding of problems of ordinary people.

In the Indian Languages section, most students opted for Hindi in the period from 2009 to 2014, followed by Marathi. But the proportion of students opting for Hindi is on a decline. 66 per cent candidates chose Hindi in 2014 compared to 74 per cent in 2009.

Caption for above chart: Apart from Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi are the only languages chosen by more than 5 per cent candidates

On the other hand, percentage of students choosing Marathi is increasing – from 5 per cent in 2009 to 9 per cent in 2014, with a peak in 2013 when 11 per cent chose the language. Note that apart from Hindi, only Marathi, Tamil and Telugu are chosen by more than 5 per cent of the candidates in the Indian language exam.

On an average, 20 per cent of the selected candidates are alumni of IITs and University of Delhi put together. Jawaharlal Nehru University, Anna University and Rajasthan University are other prominent universities from where most students come from.

These apart, University of Mumbai, University of Allahabad, MGR Medical University, IGNOU, Maharashtra University of Health Sciences, Osmania University and University of Pune are the ones from where more than ten students have qualified the exam in few or all years between 2009 to 2013.

Data show that students with engineering background now comprise the bulk of selected students, overtaking humanities. 51 per cent of the recommended candidates in 2013 were engineers, compared to 30 per cent in 2009.

Earlier, Humanities students were the most successful – 50 per cent of the students were from humanities background in 2004. But in 2011 and 2013, students with humanities education comprised of just 27 per cent of all the selected candidates. Around 12 per cent of the students have a background in medicine.

“In my broad experience over decades, I find that technical persons don't do as well or better than non-technical people in the field of administration,” TSR Subramaniam, former Cabinet Secretary told The Hindu. “For the engineering students, it is not their subject knowledge, but their training of mind that comes to play in this role,” he added, while expressing his concern that we need talent in every walk of life not just in administration, which is often glamorised. He also added that because the state spends on education, specialists are much more needed in their respective areas compared to administration, which is of a more generic nature.

Source: The Hindu, 25-06-2016

Life without Britain: European Union will struggle to survive

On Friday morning the ground beneath the European Union (EU) shook and how did it!

The financial implications of Britain’s exit from the EU will be manifold, and if market reactions are anything to go by it’s going to be a tough ride.

But Brussels, the EU headquarters, will have to brace itself for the political aftershocks. And suddenly, almost as though they were waiting for Britain’s decision, leaders of some EU-member nations are voicing similar intentions. The probability of a smaller EU, which seemed almost outlandish until this morning, is now real and amplified.

Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front is on record saying that France has 1,000 more reasons to leave EU than Britain. Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom, has promised that if he was elected the next prime minister a referendum will be held in Netherlands. Both countries go to polls within a year’s time. Sweden and Denmark also have their eurosceptics. Unsurprisingly it is nationalist, Right-of-the-centre politicians who are fanning ‘xenophobic’ emotions.

The economic prudence of Britain’s decision aside, Brexit should force Brussels to introspect. The EU was set up almost 60 years back to bring prosperity and security to Europe--while it has brought prosperity in varying degrees, on security the jury is still out.

There are many positives that the EU has brought about, especially when it comes to easing trade bureaucracy, but as is with any alliance, when the going gets tough the faultiness magnify. Two recent developments expose these wide gaps: The EU’s approach to tackling terrorism and the union’s policy towards refugees and displaced people.

The Charlie Hebdo shootings, the November 2015 Paris attacks and the Brussels bombings in March exposed the flaws in the EU’s preparedness to tackle terror attacks. If the Charlie Hebdo shootings caught EU unawares about home-grown terror, the latter two attacks exposed the chinks in the EU’s efforts to monitor and check the movement of suspects.

The refugee crisis, amplified by the current unrest in Syria and Iraq, saw thousands, if not millions, crossing borders into Europe. But not only did the EU lack a policy, but when it came to formulating one, countries were at odds with each other. Finally, all it could do was strike a deal with Turkey to accommodate the refugees and, in many ways, ask it to act as a vetting agency for displaced people wanting to enter the EU.

For the moment it looks unlikely that the EU will disintegrate with Britain’s exit--but it won’t be the same anymore. The EU will have a tough fight to keep its relevance at world forums.

It is to be seen how, or whether, Britain’s exit will affect countries queuing up to enter the union, and how many members will consider following Britain. The EU is changing; it will rest on Brussels on whether that change is for the better.

Source: Hindustan Times, 25-06-2016

Try Saying `Thank You'

SANT RAJINDER SINGH





God once sent two angels to earth to gather the prayers of humanity . The first angel was asked to collect prayers that were essentially requests from people asking God for something. The second angel was asked to collect all the prayers of thanksgiving. The two angels agreed to meet in a month with their collections.The first angel collecting prayers that appealed to God for something became extremely busy . Several baskets were needed to hold the prayers: asking for money , health, car, jewellery and clothing. Some prayed for a spouse, for children, or for better relationships. There were so many such prayers that the angel had to obtain several vans to cart them.
Meanwhile, the second angel travelled far and wide looking for prayers of thankfulness.Several days went by with hardly a prayer of gratitude heard. A month later, the two angels returned to God. The angel collecting prayers for requests was laden with many baskets.The angel collecting prayers of thankfulness had a small amount compared to the prayers requesting things.
The story illustrates the human condition. Many of us request others to do things for us, but how many of us thank them? Let us thank God for the many gifts we have received: for our birth, health, food, clothing, shelter and for our families. Let us also thank God for our education and for our jobs.However, let us not thank God merely with words but with deeds, by leading lives of nonviolence, truthfulness, purity , humility and selfless service.