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Pricing the soul ? a dollar tag on yoga
Though yoga is near extinction in India it has become a humongous industry in America, writes Kiran Bharthapudi.
As yoga, more than 5000-year-old spiritual practices, is near extinction in India — the country of origin, it has become a humongous industry in America — the Mecca for consumerism.
Yoga entered United States in 1960s with several "yogis" from India, coming over to promote the ancient Indian aesthetic, practiced for inner-peace.
For instance, according to Boris Pisman, administrative manager for the New York Integral Yoga Institute (NYIY), located few blocks away from Wall Street, Manhattan and a leading yoga institute in the United States," Integral Yoga was founded in 1966 by students who wanted to learn about spiritual approaches to life. They were dissatisfied with the material world. They responded to the teachings of Swami Satchidananda, who they persuaded to stay in New York after a visit that was planned for only three days, and created the Integral yoga institute."
However, today Yoga in United States is not so much about "dissatisfied with material life" as it is about glamour, health and at the end of the day dollars - millions of them.
According to Yoga Journal, the leading publication in the field, "about 18 million Americans now practice yoga. The average practitioner's yearly expenditure on all things yoga-instruction, mats, props, clothing, weekend workshops, books, CDs, videos-could be conservatively estimated at a ballpark $1,500. That amount times 18 million equals $27 billion. To put this into perspective, if the yoga business were consolidated, the resulting corporation (Yoga-Mart?) would be slightly larger than Dow Chemical, slightly smaller than Microsoft." Further, according to the World Yoga Foundation, yoga industry sales in United States will reach $ 40 billion in 2005.
Referring back to NYIYI, "over the past thirty years, Integral Yoga Institute (IYI) has trained hundreds of teachers who have opened their own studios or branches of IYI, which exist in practically every state across United States- with main centres in Virginia, San Francisco and New York. Further, IYI offers 125 classes a week and has an attendance of 5000 yoga students."
