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Monday, September 8, 2008

For them, Yoga is just childs play

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It begins to rain, and the snails curl into their shells.

The two and three-year-olds have just done a variation of an asana which helps digestion. Mumbai's youngest yoga pupils, some of whom have barely learnt to walk a few months ago, cannot follow instructions more complex than that.

These sessions at Little Bo Peep, a playschool at Khar Danda, are attended mainly by children from upscale nearby Khar and Bandra. Even Kid's Concept at Pali Hill, Bandra, has yoga sessions for toddlers.

"Nowadays, competition and stress begin at a very young age. This will provide them with some ammunition and focus for the years ahead," said Poonam Mirchandani, founder of Little Bo Peep.

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Monday, June 30, 2008

Are you feeling Seasonal Affective Disorder? Blame it on the rains

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Dark Skies and incessant rain are casting a cloud of depression over Indian cities, say scientists, terming the phenomenon as SAD -Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Thirty four-year-old Mumbai yoga instructor Pallavi Acharya, for instance, finds it hard to get out of bed these days. "The grayness, gloominess and rains make me feel low during the monsoons. When you open the papers and read about diseases such as leptospirosis, dengue and malaria, it gets you down," she said.

Mental health charities in Mumbai record an 80 per cent increase in calls to helplines during the rains. Some callers are clinically depressed, but there are also large numbers of previously happy people who just feel low because of the weather.

"From September to June we get around five calls a day but during the monsoon it is 15-18," said Johnson Thomas, director of Aasra, a mental health NGO. Dr Rajesh Sagar, psychiatrist, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, said there should be two episodes of depression in consecutive months to classify it as SAD. "It is not commonly diagnosed in Delhi. It is more prevalent in European countries." However, one of the world's leading SAD ex perts told Hindustan Times that seasonal depression also occurs in tropical coun tries during the monsoon months.

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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Ramadoss gets Ramdev boost in fight for good health

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Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss has just won a famous friend in his battle against alcohol, tobacco and junk food. Yoga and lifestyle guru Swami Ramdev, who commands a huge following across the country, has offered to help the Union Health Ministry to get the masses off unhealthy addictions.

"We've been in touch and we'll work together," Ramadoss told HT.

Winning support for his clean lifestyle initiative from people other than public health experts is a first for Ramadoss. He has a track record of antagonising many famous people, from Shah Rukh Khan for smoking in public to Vijay Mallya for naming his IPL team after an alcohol brand.

Ramadoss and Ramdev now appear to have patched up differences over the curative powers of yoga for AIDS. "Even when I criticised yoga for treating AIDS because of lack of scientific proof, I maintained that Swami Ramdev was doing a public service by promoting this ancient exercise form," said Ramadoss. "Prevention is better than cure and if a healthy lifestyle that includes yoga can reduce the risk of dis- ease and early death, I'm all tor it."

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Monday, April 21, 2008

For Putin successor, yoga the best pill

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Yoga is set to get a huge push in Russia, where the Indian art was banned and lessons were passed on secretly during the Soviet era.

Dmitri Medvedev, who will take over as Russia's new president next month, is a known yoga man and is expected to do what his predecessor Vladimir Putin did to judo.

"Little by little, I'm mastering yoga," Medvedev, who takes pride in his ability to perform shirshasana, a headstand pose, recently told the weekly news magazine Itogi. "The responsibility (of my job) is huge. To prevent headaches, I needed to practice yoga more intensively than before."

Yoga was banned in the Soviet era as the art, with its Hindu spiritual underpinnings, was seen as against the prevailing philosophy of MarxismLeninism. Today, it sweeps through Russia's physical culture studios, which until recently were dominated by body building and martial arts.

"Ten years ago there were only three yoga schools in all of Moscow, now there are several hundreds," said Inna Assekritova, a Moscow business executive who got hooked to yoga 30 years ago, when it was strictly banned. "In Soviet times, it was almost impossible to find a teacher; and all information about it had to be secretly passed from hand to hand," she said.

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