Who would have thought I would suffer a mental breakdown and depressive episode in Rishikesh, the yoga capital of the world. Actually it is the Tapovan in Rishikesh where all the yoga hustle bustle is.

And in the month of April I saw more foreigners on the streets of Tapovan than Indians. It had a truly cosmopolitan and modern feel to it mixed with Indian origin spirituality. It is a beautiful mix.

Hotels, restaurants,cafés, lodges,yoga institutes, shops, beautiful waterfalls, Ganga ghat and travellers from all over the world mostly sums up Tapovan. I like it immensely – it has a mystic energy which permeates you and lifts your spirits.

I went to Rishikesh first for three days at the end of December the weather was extremely cold and fresh, the sky looked the kind of deep blue that I had never seen for decades that I have lived in the gray city filled with dust and smoke. The air was was fresh and had more nourishment that the stale air back in Delhi. I remember telling my son I wish I had means to pack it and carry it back. And I remember waking up to the view of an azure blue Ganga flowing in between the mountains. The sun too felt different and the trees their leaves fluttering in the crisp winter wind.

I enjoyed the climb up the steep hill, they called it Neer Trek. It was beautiful and challenging. We trekked up higher and higher leaving the crowds behind and went up till Neer village where I met a hundred year old woman. She must have been taller, I say this because she was half my height, and I am not a tall woman myself. It seemed she had shrunk. May be people shrink as they get older. She told us, she was hundred. She pointed to the onion field in front of her little yellow cottage and said we are like that, that crop of onion, we grow, we bloom and then we die.

She said something that I also said sometime before in a little poem that I wrote –

Dandelion

Dan as some call me

I exist and then I don’t

That is all there is to it

And if you pause and think

To all of us

We exist and then we don’t

And for the same reason as Dandelion

This year in the month of March my husband told me I could go back to Rishikesh if I wanted for a month. This time we had some money to make it happen and I started thinking of it. Why not club it with a yoga course I thought. I did not had teacher training in mind but then that is what was being offered; a 200 hour yoga teacher training course by all the institutes.

I finalised one yog institute. I was following it in Instagram. It’s Instagram presence was really good. Beautiful pictures mixed with some yogic wisdom. And I must say who ever was managing that Instagram account was doing a very good job of creating just right posts with right wordings to make people want to come and indulge themselves in all the goodness they had to offer. It almost felt like a loss to not be able to join the institute.

By the last week of March, the owner of the institute, Chitra was in touch with me through what’s app. She was very prompt and polite. No she wasn’t only polite she was kind, very kind. That is how I summed her up through our what’s app chats.

I paid her 5 k advance to book my spot cause she said they will run out of spots soon probably in a day or two. It was around fifteen people per batch. She sent me a document welcoming me and my son to the course and my husband was very happy and excited seeing those first two lines of welcome addressed to me and my son by name. He gets excited like a kid for most things which are new and daring.

We packed a lot of stuff more than possibly what we would need for the course. we had two suitcases and one bag packed along with one backpack and two small plastic boxes.

It was drizzling some days before we started and weather had turned cold all of a sudden. My son caught cold and ran a temperature two days before we were to start. I thought we would have to cancel but then he was up and about next day except for a little cough.

It was drizzling in Rishikesh too and it was much colder than back home. “People are wearing woollens and jackets,”my husband remarked as we entered Tapovan. Now on top of all the stuff we were carrying I thought I would have to buy woollens too. At least one jacket each for me and my son.

We turned left from the main road and climbed up to reach the place which turned out to be a low budget hotel.

I thought they had their own space like the schools and colleges. But I later learnt that almost every yoga institute runs their business from a hotel. There is a contract between the hotel and the institute. Hotel provides the lodging and food and institutes the courses.

I wondered what differentiated all these more than a hundred yoga institutes from each other. They all ran package courses, 200 hrs, 300 hrs….yoga teacher training courses churning out perhaps at least a few thousand yoga trainers a month. I am just doing a rough estimate, if there are two hundred yoga institutes which some one told me there were. And I am using just 100 of them for a conservative estimate, then considering an average of 30 students coming out per month makes 3000 yoga trainers passing out in a month.

I was looking forward to see Chitra. I had been in touch with her all along. But she wasn’t there. It was a hotel after all and she must be staying somewhere else. I was disappointed I was not prepared to stay in a hotel for 24 days.

Pictures on Instagram were misleading.There was not a single picture of white and red cheap plastic sheet covered dining table. Not a single picture of their beady eyed short, podgy and greasy perpetually angry cook. Not a single picture of the room they lent out to the people who came for the course. The room was more depressing than the reception. I was scared to stand bare foot on the worn out dark brownish black floor rug.

I put it out on the corridor for them to take it. I am old enough to know that bare floor is better than floor covered with a dirty rug teeming with all sorts of germs and dirt. When I was young I didn’t care anything about cleanliness. A bed to sleep was all I needed and food to eat, as long as it was edible.

The woman from Mauritius whom I met on the corridor earlier. She was standing on her door way when we came in. She told me she too removed the rug from her room. She was as old as me perhaps. Only old people care about these things.

We later took her to market with us. And I thought I was nice to her. I had asked her many times if she needed help carrying bags or if she needed to rest or if I was walking too fast. I am telling nice behaviour of me towards her because she later turned her back to me when she joined the gang of most popular girl in the course.

Two single beds were joined together to form a double bed in the room. And I was scared to look beneath the white bed sheet for I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I saw something gross. It wasn’t going to be easy to sleep on the bed anyway, the mattress was very soft and we were used to sleeping in very firm mattresses at home.

You will probably laugh at me for being so fastidious. Let me tell you, you become like that with age because you know things and you know yourselves more than you knew yourself when you were young. Also when you are young you are more preoccupied with things that the young are preoccupied with. And I know you know what they are. Sometimes I just close my eyes and think about them and I wish I had the wisdom that I have now.

When we get old we lose our beauty but we gain something better and that is wisdom. We also know what we absolutely don’t want. We don’t want to waste the rest of our life on things we know we don’t want and life goes by pretty fast once you hit forty.

I was on the third floor and the only water dispenser was on the second floor near the staircase. It was sort of broken. I tried filling my bottle once and gave up in frustration. At that time it did not occur to me to go down to the kitchen on ground floor and fill my bottle. I am not very smart about these things. It took me two full days to memorise timings for dining and to understand that people were always milling around the dining area around the opening time, waiting to rush to the dining hall to get food and a place at the table.

That explained why we never got hot food or salad or a decent place to sit. There was always less food if you were late and you would not get the salad because the salad serving bowl was never refilled unless you asked for it. Sometimes we got a little dal and and hard rice and we were okay with it. Dining was sort of survival of fittest game. And it was stressful. I shuddered at the thought of having to play the game for 24 days but I have been in worse situations before in my life and I told myself this was nothing but a little inconvenience. These things that I am talking about, you will not get from Instagram pictures even when the institute have posted thousands of them in their account.

Kitchen was just behind the reception on ground floor. A rectangular hall one fourth of which was the kitchen and the rest dining hall. We took our food in big rectangular steel plates which did not shine like steel does probably because they weren’t washed properly. They were stacked up near the buffet table.

The walls of the hotel were painted deep blue, and on the blue walls were bluish black heart shaped trees and black birds. It gave me an eerie feeling. It felt like I was in some horror movie in a horror house. I am not being sarcastic it is actually what I felt.

On the corridor between the rooms hung philosophical quotes. They had tried their best to give the hotel an aura of a yoga abode, though I doubt anyone felt that. May be some have, may be some just want to say they liked it just for the sake of holding a different view point.

They could have at least briefed the hotel staff if training them was not something the institute wanted to spend its money and efforts on. There were these young, wild boys, who were working in the kitchen, cleaning and running errands. They looked fresh off the streets, not mellowed by any sort of training to work in the hospitality. They were as rough and wild as they are on streets without work.

A very tiny used half filled bottle of hand wash in the bathroom was the only item they had generously supplied us with. And that too was half empty. After the Havan ceremony they told us not to take items from room back with us, meaning not to steal. I want you to note this fact that they told us – not to steal. It was like a stab, but I thought it must be the regular SOP, standard operating procedure of the hotel to ask guests not to steal, even if they had full trust in the guests. But what made the whole thing weird was there was nothing to steal, there was nothing in the room except for dirty floor rugs and a tiny hand wash bottle. I am sure they weren’t thinking we would steal the whole bed, mattresses, and bathroom fixtures.

I got it finally. Their Instagram pictures gave a feeling of a luxury spa or resort where these beautiful foreigners came to learn and relax. But the reality was the foreigners were tired tense backpackers, who complained less than Indians did. I wondered if they were angry at the deception. At how far removed the reality was from the Instagram stories. It was not a relaxing stay at all. And I had never had to rush for food in my entire life the way I had to here. Dining was open for an hour only each in morning, afternoon and evening and in that one hour window thirty students had to line up to take food and eat.

Havan ceremony looked so amazing in Instagram pictures. Everybody wearing white, a garland of yellow orange marigolds around their neck. They had professional photographers to take all those pictures and videos later selecting the most gorgeous and serene pictures which were just right for Instagram feed. But in reality the Havan ceremony felt fake and tiring. But may be everyone felt differently I am just talking about what I felt.

A young Spanish girl sat next to me during Havan. I saw Chitra, she was squatting on the floor doing something with flowers. I don’t remember if I said hello to her. But I remember her looking up and smiling at me. She was really short. I think that was the first thing I noticed about her and her brownish almond shaped eyes.

She wasn’t wearing white herself she was wearing a bright blue polka dotted long kurta. I thought that was very irresponsible and hypocritical of her to do that. She had reminded me half a dozen times for white clothes for the ceremony.

Ganesha had his back to us the entire ceremony. It was weird and it was cruel. Yes I am using the word cruel and you might feel it is inappropriate but to me that is the right word. It was cruel to stare at God’s back for ninety percent of the Havan ceremony. We were sitting in a semi circle in a large hall and all of us had the view of only the god’s back or at most the side. I looked around, everybody looked a little bored perhaps but content to be sitting there looking at the private Pooja being done by the manager of the institute. Yes it did feel like he was performing his own little private Pooja. He sat at a distance from us with two other men who were saying mantras. It made no sense to me as to why the arrangement was like that. Would it have been like that cause not everybody would like to pray to Ganesha because he was a Hindu God. Even though calling him a Hindu god is weird because a god cannot be god if he is just a Hindu or a Muslim or a Christian god.

Later they called every one to dance in a circle as the two men who were chanting mantras now sang popular devotional songs that I have listened to in YouTube and played tabla. I thought it was very staged and fake. It was right for the people who were extroverts and wanted that – song and dance experience but it was really uncomfortable for me, I wanted quiet and an atmosphere more conducive to let everyone be quiet to do atma manthan for the 24 days that we were there. I hated Bollywood getting forced on us. Chitra and the manager of the hotel took the lead to dance and urged everyone to dance as well. Manager who had a sulking and brooding look on his face all the time broke into a smile for the dance part.

After a day or so I felt high school vibes. A woman suddenly got into this avatar of being the most popular girl. She told everyone- ‘I am an actress’, a dozen times at least. I am not sure people were impressed with her being an actress. And I am not sure that she got it that people weren’t impressed.

She was behaving like a cute bubbly girl, pulling all the girls in her group and for some reason directing her hate only at me. I did not feel bad. I was amused. I wanted to see more of her shenanigans. More than once she threw nasty remarks at me, ‘you dragged your son along or he wanted to come,’ she snidely asked me. And I realised for some reason she dislike me enough to not include me in her circle and parties. I have no love for circles or parties so I wasn’t affected much. She must have been surprised that I wasn’t affected I did not want anything that she wanted. I did not try desperately to talk or to make friends. I was what I was and I did not change that. Besides I enjoyed going for long walks with my son and there were enough people on the streets to talk to and be friendly with. I am sure my reaction disappointed her a lot, for she did mellow a bit towards me.

The food pics and information about their food in Instagram was one of the reason I picked that institute. One of the food pic had a handsome man in chef’s hat holding out a beautifully laid out plate of food. It wasn’t something exotic or drool worthy but looked like a clean fresh good food. The kind we could eat everyday even the people with sensitive guts like me. It felt safe.

From comments I learnt that he was a chef. And his name was Amit.

In reality there was no Amit in a chef’s hat. The man who cooked was a short podgy and angry man with a couple of boys to help him. And he dished out just basic food like the one I cook at home, only I am better.

I would write the rest of the yoga fiasco in Rishikesh in the next blog. It won’t be good to turn this blog into a bad novel😂

You can read my second blog here.