Journalism and activism
This blog will soon be discontinued. All the postings here will remain online, with links to archived copies at my new site: danielsimpson.info.
For now it’s a work in progress, but I’ll be writing more there soon about my book, which is due to be published in 2012. To read a preview, visit roughguidedarkside.com.
In the meantime, I’m posting articles at Elephant Journal.
Cross-posted at Elephant Journal
India isn’t just another country. Sometimes it can feel like a parallel universe. Here’s a scene from the State Bank of India in Rishikesh.
Check the reading matter of choice on the foreign exchange desk. Among traders at a Western banking behemoth, that might be a glossy lifestyle mag, or even cruder forms of porn. But this guy’s got a list of twenty commandments, beginning with one to get up at 4 a.m., and put in three hours of God-realization before the day job.
The text, composed by Swami Sivananda, instructs devotees to meditate cross-legged (if they can’t sit in lotus or siddhasana), and finish their practice with headstand and a shoulder-stand, followed by “twenty pranayamas”.
The impact on banking business is unclear, which suggests surprising parallels with the West. Take Europe’s biggest bank, HSBC. Its last boss was a priest, dubbed God’s Banker. He even authored books with spiritual twists, which according to the Financial Times “sought to reconcile serving God with serving Mammon.”
This didn’t stop his firm from stashing $11.5 billion in the first few months of 2011, while firing a tenth of its workforce to maximise profits.
HSBC prides itself on its “social responsibility” (though this is corporately illegal). Its adverts once said: “collective action will be required from governments, businesses and individuals to stimulate the adoption of energy efficiency and clean-generation technologies to stabilize CO2 emissions.” But it’s done little to turn that talking into action. Because of our addiction to oil, coal and gas, cutting carbon means cutting the profits that bankers depend on, and the future wealth and pensions people dream of.
As an FT headline screamed a couple of years ago, our collective “Drive for growth ‘will ruin planet’.” Though it was quoting UK government advisers, their words were buried away as news in brief, to vanish down the corporate media memory hole. After all, they warned big business would destroy us, and that’s not what sells papers to the rich.
Fast forward to the start of this month, and the latest attempt to pretend that the world plans to do something to avert a “climate catastrophe”, while ensuring any such prospect is impossible. Leading the wrecking crew at UN talks in Durban was the world’s fabled “largest democracy”: India.
“How do I give a blank check signing away the livelihood rights of 1.2 billion members of our population?” asked its environment minister, refusing to sign up to legally binding emissions cuts, unless richer nations stopped polluting first. It’s an echo of infamous lines from 20 years ago, when the U.S. conspired to torpedo other summits: “The American way of life is non-negotiable.”
India claims to want solutions based on “equity”, but it’s obsessed with rampant economic growth, which does little for hundreds of millions of its poor. Like the sixth of Americans classed as “food insecure”, they don’t really count. While politicians and journalists froth about “India Shining”, farmers steeped in debt commit mass suicide, and starvation and malnutrition are endemic. The government leaves its surplus grain to rot, or exports it at subsidized rates that the poor are denied.
As one Indian writer observes: “Corporate Globalisation needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in poorer countries, to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. It’s called ‘Creating a Good Investment Climate’.”
The finest climate today is in Gujarat, where the economy basks in double-digit growth, and ministers give investors what they want, like access to land and resources (no matter who lives there). Home to roughly one in twenty Indians, Gujarat produces a quarter of exports. And it’s run by a Hindu hardliner, who oversaw genocide. The Economist seems to hope he’ll run the country. “He has yet to shed his polarizing image,” it coughs diplomatically, “but he has at least built up an enviable record on the economy.” All hail the Slumdog Billionaires!
So what of the words on the desk in Rishikesh? It’s fair enough to focus on transcendence, but unless we resist injustice we’re complicit. “Never fail to fulfil your duties,” says the Swami. If he doesn’t mean following orders, I agree.
Millions of Chinese are embracing the ancient Indian practice of yoga – or at least its American version.
The following article appears in the Winter 2011 issue of Yoga International, which is now on sale.
This extract gives a taster of the gist:
Beneath the surface of its rapid transmutation, the country is troubled. While a few get improbably rich, a billion others struggle with inflation, unemployment, and migration. These widening inequalities breed resentment and despair, which drive increasing numbers to suicide.
“There’s an urgent need here,” says Chen Si, a journalist working to promote more classical yoga teaching. He organized a conference this summer that brought Iyengar and a dozen of his protégés to Guangzhou, China, face-to-face with 1,300 students. Billed as the China-India Yoga Summit, the event was endorsed by officials in New Delhi and Beijing, whose relations have been strained since the 1950s, when India opposed China’s seizure of Tibet and gave refuge to the 14th Dalai Lama. Border wars promptly ensued.
Trade has diminished their hostility, culminating in a visit to India last December by Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, who paid tribute to Gandhi, quoted the Upanishads, and waxed lyrical on how Buddhism shaped China. To top it off, he announced that his daughter practiced asana.
Unlike the Dalai Lama or Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline banned in China, yoga is being embraced by the state. Chinese authorities talk it up as a force for “harmony,” echoing their counterparts in India. “There is a growing social conflict due to our relentless pursuit of material objects,” an Indian diplomat told the summit. “Yoga can be a useful instrument for promoting social harmony. After all, only individuals at peace and in harmony with themselves can build a peaceful and harmonious society.”
By inviting an Indian master to teach, Chen aimed to empower the Chinese to practice yoga more deeply, and thereby foster social change. While these are sensitive issues in a one-party state, he feels fairly secure. “China has a tradition of embracing foreign cultures and making them its own,” he says. “That’s why it’s been so vibrant.”
The full text is available below.
Written for the China-India Yoga Summit newsletter
A Master Class For Beginners
By Daniel Simpson
I’ve been practising Iyengar yoga since 2004, never dreaming I’d meet the man who taught my teachers. Although he told us in Light on Life that he’d “never retire”, Mr Iyengar had already stopped giving public classes. I thought the nearest I’d get to experiencing one was YouTube, until a lucky encounter one Friday in America.
Visiting San Francisco for work in April, I dropped into the Abode of Iyengar Yoga, run by Manouso Manos. Waiting outside for a class, someone said he’d heard that Mr Iyengar would be teaching this summer, in China. “If you’ve come all the way from London to the Abode,” he quipped, “maybe you’re the kind of guy who’ll make it.”
For a couple of weeks, at least, I thought he was joking. Then I found myself scouring the Internet for details. The airfare seemed prohibitive to start with. Freelance writers don’t make lots of money, and taking time off means earning even less. Having spent a year writing a book, which hasn’t been sold yet, I felt I couldn’t justify the expense. And this seemed a terrible reason not to go.
As Faeq Biria put it to me later, in a wonderful chat that we otherwise wouldn’t have shared: “sometimes in life, you know you have to be bold.”
Everything still felt uncertain, even once my place was confirmed. Teachers back in London weren’t encouraging. “It looks quite a big event,” one mused. “I hope Guruji will make it.” Another wished me luck, but wasn’t tempted. “Mass yoga doesn’t appeal to me,” she sniffed. By the time my plane took off, I had few expectations.
A report on the China-India Yoga Summit
The image below (click to enlarge) is from an article in the September issue of Yoga Magazine, which is now on sale.
It’s billed as a “special feature on the life and works of B.K.S. Iyengar”, and it explains how he shaped the practice of yoga.
I’ve written before about its impact on my life. Here’s a personal sample of the bigger picture:
At first, I was struck by his size, or the lack of it, apart from a barrel chest. Flanked by his two most senior American teachers, both relative beanpoles, he looked like Yoda sporting a knee-length golden kurta. His silver winged eyebrows and mane lent him the air of a mad professor crossed with a God. Though he calls himself an artist and philosopher, Iyengar prefers to see teaching as a science.
Yoga, he said, is “an investigative instrument”, doing “research work from the skin to the self.” Although it merges “the individual self of the head with the universal self of the divine heart”, it’s subtle work, not blissing out with candles. “I teach spiritual yoga, not sensual yoga,” he told us. But minds can get distracted by the senses, and by what we think we know.
“You are all speaking of information technology,” Iyengar crackled through a headset. Most of the assembled throng were under 40, and brandishing smartphones. “I am giving you technological information. This is far superior.”
The article can be downloaded here. A text version follows.
