Yoga Day - America's And The World's Fascination Poem by Jacson Gelato

India has nothing to offer you
except Yoga and a lot of immigrants
who want to be Americans
and avail your economic blessings;

if you go to India
it will offer you plentiful sightseeing
as there are many palaces in Rajasthan,
and the grand Taj mahal in Agra.

India is also having its own wave of poverty:
there are towns and villages
where poor people live in
thatched houses and tin walls
which you can see as you fly into
the airports in Mumbai city;

yet India's leaders come
and talk of India
as a prosperous country,
they give tall speeches to come
and invest in business ventures;

they conceal the rustic image
of their backward communities
where the food routine consists of
pulses and rice grains
which is so under nourishing;

if you visit Karnataka or Northern cities,
on the way there are people
who have no slippers on their feet
the children have no clothes,
there is no joyfulness in their lifestyle.

Do they do yoga?
do they know what is yoga?
do YOU know what is yoga
and what is its history?
the sages practiced yoga,
they were hermits who repelled life
and they lived in denial;

they felt flustered about death;
they asked why death after life,
they meditated to find an answer;
they sat in one place
in the woods and jungles
to overcome their anguish;
they wanted to discard affliction,
one such person was Gautama Buddha.

Yoga is an exercise such sages did
to unwind their rigidity;
it is age old and unpredictable
of its benefits and its gains;
if you believe in it, you win
but many in India believe that
it is hard work that yields fruits
of labor and flourishment
as work gives flexibility
and it helps to derive
a lot of satisfaction
whether it is the early morning
that takes them for a walk
or whether it is the silence
of the night that makes them to
fall asleep after a hard day
at their workplace;

so yoga is indeed some age old joke
which foreigners came and adopted
when in India they took hashish
in those mountains of Rishikesh, Haridwar
and sat there meditating by those sages
trying to find inner peace;
today the world is enjoying yoga;
what next?



The History of Yoga:
Traditionally yoga was practiced by the sages, who renounced a worldly life to live in seclusion and turn their attention to the pursuit of divine knowledge. Even in the ancient world this must have been viewed by the general public as a lifestyle relegated to practice by ascetics, oddballs and hermits! Gradually perceptions changed as the principals of yoga became accepted into the mainstream culture and there is evidence of forms of yoga being practiced throughout society from the ruling class right through to the main working population. However, in the more recent past, yoga once again became obscured to the fringes. It wasn't until the 19th and 20th centuries when spiritual leaders began highlighting the benefits of yoga to wider audiences that yoga was once more embraced in Asia and also gradually spread throughout the world.