CHRISTOPHER BROWN / POLARIS FOR TIME

A STRETCH: Many Indians are taking up yoga for the body, not the spirit

It's In to Be Thin in India
	Millions of Indians are undernourished, but an increasingly overweight middle class is longing to be lean
	By Sara Rajan

Posted Monday, November 1, 2004; 20:00 HKT
To New Delhi resident Peggy Mohan, yoga had always seemed hopelessly impractical—better suited to yogis than to busy urbanites like herself. "Every time someone mentioned yoga, I would imagine myself having to get up at 6 a.m. to go sit under a tree and learn meditation," she says. "Where in the middle of going to work and looking after your family is there time for that?" But as she saw herself slouching deeper and deeper into a slothful middle age, the 51-year-old music teacher determined to stop the rot: "I didn't want things to end that way. I wanted the fitness and something of my old self back." So, in 2003, Mohan joined Bharat Thakur's Artistic Yoga Studio in New Delhi, a chain that combines yogic techniques with cardiovascular exercise. As she performs the challenging sarvangasana, raising her body to a perfect 90° angle and balancing the weight on her shoulders and neck, Mohan isn't pursuing a higher plane of being or even relaxation. She's after a trim yogic body.

In the past, the idea of anyone needing to lose weight—let alone by using a 5,000-year-old discipline designed to expand the mind, not shrink the hips—would have seemed ridiculous in India. After all, famine has long haunted a population that still includes the highest number of undernourished people of any country. Yet thanks to an increasingly fatty diet and a precipitous drop in physical activity, obesity is on the rise in India's prosperous cities; the Nutrition Foundation of India (NFI), a food-policy NGO, estimates that about 45% of women and 29% of men in urban areas are overweight.

Until recently, a few extra pounds were considered a plus. In places where food has historically been scarce and expensive, a well-rounded appearance served as a powerful way of advertising one's prosperity. But over the past decade or so, as incomes went up among the urban masses, food became ever more accessible and cheap (thanks in part to a fast-food sector that is expected to generate more than $1 billion in sales by 2005). Buddha-bellies became commonplace in the middle and even lower middle classes. At first, nobody seemed to worry about the health consequences. "In a country with so many undernourished people, those who could afford it wanted their children to look plump and healthy, not realizing that plump and pink children become plump and pink adults who die by the time they hit 40," says Prema Ramachandran, director of the NFI.

That realization is starting to dawn on more Indians, as an increasingly Westernized media and slinky popular movie actresses promote a more svelte physical ideal. Even in the conservative south, where cinema owners once painted larger hips and breasts on stick-thin Hollywood starlets appearing on movie billboards, slimness is increasingly sought after. "The regional variations are breaking down," says Vir Sanghvi, a food critic and columnist for the Hindustan Times newspaper.

The pressure to lose weight is fueling a fitness industry that now generates an estimated $430 million a year, according to consultancy McKinsey & Co. The spoils are going to entrepreneurs like Bharat Thakur, a yoga teacher whose chain of 60 fitness studios repackages ancient yogic routines to meet modern needs. "Yoga used to be just about flexibility," says Thakur, 30. "But my students don't just want to wind their bodies in different ways. They want to get good-looking, too." Thakur says he dislikes the Western obsession with high-impact exercise. So he borrowed some of the fat-vaporizing principles behind sweaty workouts to tailor a program that uses yoga to improve overall fitness. "Vigorous running and exercise can knot muscles and stiffen the body whereas yoga is low-impact with better results. So why not choose yoga?" he asks.

Thakur began experimenting with hybrid techniques during a stint as a high school yoga teacher. He opened his first studio in 1998 in Bombay. His yoga empire now serves more than 100,000 students across India, and he has plans to expand to London and Dubai. "Nothing, however good or ancient, is of any purpose if it isn't tailored to the masses," he says.

Thakur's cultural mix-and-match has given rise to a number of other hip yoga gurus, like Deepika Mehta and Surya Swami. He even predicts that his brand of yoga may one day replace traditional gyms altogether, at least in India. "People are quickly going to realize the negative effects of pitting their bodies against machinery," he says. Western influence may be helping to make India fat, but the biggest country in the subcontinent is fighting back in its own way.

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