Farwell dear Rajima

It is hard to believe that she is no more and she has said her final good bye, when I heard the news last night for a few seconds I became numb. Yes farewell my dearest teacher Rajima. She was a firebrand, intellect of highest order, devotee of the highest order, a true saint, kind hearted and one who knew how to effectively use carrot and stick.

Her sessions let it be Art of Living courses or the sessions of Bhagavata or Yoga Vasista were divine. She was one of those personalities which either attracted people like a magnet and kept them devoted to her or repulsed them from the get go, I don’t think there ever was an intermediate level. 

I still remember the day back in 2008 when she looked me in the eye and asked “why are you not writing down and where is your notebook?”, in the same course when I had asked a “hypothetical question”, she had shunned me off and pointed towards action. A true yogi who really understood the 7 layers of existence.

Here presence was enough to change energy of the place. I would not be an exaggeration to say that she transformed people for better, she believed in action and always lead from the front. One teacher in my experience who made no exceptions for the rules, including herself. 

May her soul rest in peace, we miss you Rajima.

Te3n – Hindi Movie

There are “thrillers” and real thrillers, Te3n movie belongs to the category of real thrillers, I would qualify it in the same league as Kahani or Drishya if not higher. Going by the title I had presumed the movie has got to do with game of cards and was pleasantly surprised when that was not true.

The movie kept me and Sandhya on the toes from the start to end.  Sandhya, who usually is good in guessing the plot half way through the movie was also thrilled by the movie.

The story line is simple, a desperate grand father wants a closure to the kidnap and eventual death of his beloved grand daughter. For everyone including the police department it is a closed case for despite their best efforts at the time of incident they couldn't solve it and there is no new intel that can throw some fresh light. To top it off, the kidnapping/death is one such unique case and such a case has never repeated again. For the police it is a case file and for the grand father it is his grand daughter. What happens next is the story. All the actors (Amitabh Bachan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Vidya Balan and few others) have given very real controlled performances, no item songs or fight scenes. 

Grab a bucket of popcorn, find the movie and watch it without fail, you can thank me later for recommending it. 

ps: it is available on einthusan.com 

Praise the trainer :)

It is not new, I have been with Camp Gladiator for almost 6 months now and my trainer has always been the most awesome Julie Burns.

Last camp after her trainer refresher program she introduced a new work out on Tuesday of week 4 known as CG Fight Gone Right, it is a series of 5 exercises done for a duration of 1 minute each and repeated 5 times, of course there is a 1 minute break between 5 minute sets. In total 30 minutes. 

The idea apparently is to repeat this every camp that way there is a benchmark to compare against and see how we are progressing, last camp when we did it for the first time I had made fun of it saying “if I don’t see any improvement, I can blame the trainer” and Julie had laughed at it.

After doing the exercises again today (2nd time) and recording the numbers I have come around to praise the trainer.

Julie Burns, you simply rock.

Here is a piece of great news, Austinites you get to train the next camp for $8 as part of a CG promotion.

Second International Day of Yoga celebrations

They say everything is big and better in Texas, so why should our yoga day be an exception? you read it right, Art of Living foundation in collaboration with HSS and ISHA foundation along with ~45 partners celebrated the International Day of Yoga on July 30 2016.  Did I tell you there were ~800 people in attendance doing yoga. 

Back in May 2016, when one of our teachers raised the point that we need to celebrate international day of Yoga and it will not be done on June 21st when the rest of the world celebrates but on July 31st, I admit, I was one of the few who was some what disappointed and didn’t want us to sign up to lead the effort for I didn’t see us becoming another event management  organization.

Thankfully they didn’t listen to me and took it up in a stride to organize the event, soon enough we had a Facebook page, a website,  few collaborators and lots of partners which kept on growing over the next month or so. In the end we had over 40 partners and 3 other organizations which were actively collaborating with us.

Within the limited budget we were able to flyer, conduct TV interviews and unlimited sharing and advertising on Facebook.  The only avenue I think we left untapped was Twitter. In the end, all of these created enough awareness amongst Austin crowd that we had ~800 people showed up to do yoga on a hot summer Saturday evening. Needless to say we are thankful to all those who showed up to do the yoga.

The event day truly saw each organization bring out their expertise to the game. We from Art of Living brought our expertise of overall organization and had our hand in every single aspect of the event, be it on stage with yoga, music and meditation or the ground work of  crowd management. HSS and ISHA had the man/woman/student power to handle the masses of people who were heading to the capitol  (on a side note, volunteers of HSS had come from Houston and San Antonio to help out/assist the event), Agni the dance studio handled the whole stage setup, microphones, speakers, the yoga dance and the other logistical side of the event, last but not the least our yoga partners who spread out on stage and all around the capitol grounds leading the Yoga.    

Yes we did it, the second ever yoga day celebrations was a grand success beyond all metrics. We do have a lot of people to thank both inside our organization and outside and more importantly he Counsel General of India, Houston. 

Keep an eye on this area for I will be posting the pics and videos as and when I receive them.