Capitalism Comes to Mao's Mausoleum

Yoga on Copacabana Conducted by a Brazilian Beauty The one thing I enjoyed most during my brief stay in Rio de Janeiro was the jogging I did on Copacabana Beach every morning. The beauty of the beach certainly had a lot to do with it. And the beauty of scantily-clad women, most of them just basking in the morning sun and some playing volleyball, had something to do with it, too. But what made my mornings most memorable were the conversations I had with total strangers and the scenes I witnessed which had nothing to do with the semi-nude women. One morning, it was a coconut vendor on the beach who caught my attention. I stopped and watched the way he made a hole to insert a straw into the coconut, before he handed it to a young couple…. The couple threw away the straw and started drinking the milk straight from the coconut. That gave me an excuse to initiate a conversation with them…. On another morning … I stopped to watch a karate class…. I was eagerly watching when another jogger – bare-chested, maybe in his sixties – stopped and walked toward me. “Don’t you have such things in your country?” he asked, smilingly…. A German native, he had been living in Rio de Janeiro for several years. He had been to India several times, he said, and gave me a long list of the places he had visited. “I loved the Pink City,” he said…. On the following day, I had a more enjoyable conversation, with another stranger. An elderly jogger, he looked back while overtaking me and shouted, “I am sure you can do faster than that.” I laughed. He slowed down to keep pace with me. I knew he wanted to talk. “Do you know Vishwanathan Anand?” he asked…. He was a widely-traveled Brazilian and an avid chess player. He said he had participated in many international chess tournaments and played against many world champions, including Kasparov and Karpov. “I always lose to these guys in the first round itself,” he added. “But that doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that I never had a chance to play against this child prodigy from India, Vishwanathan Anand. I hope it happens one day before I die.” “I hope so, too,” I told him. “And I pray to God that it happens soon.”… ● Interesting scenes and conversations like these made my visit to Rio full of heart-warning experiences. But none was more heart-warming than what I experienced on the last day. On that day, my jogging came to a sudden stop when I saw a group of people practicing yoga on the beach. “India meets Brazil on the sands of Copacabana,” I said to myself and watched them – with pride and admiration. It was an unusually bright day. The yoga students and their young, attractive teacher were in the lotus position, in deep meditation. The morning Brazilian sun that fell on their faces made them look blissful…. According to the brochure handed out by an aide to the yoga teacher, the beach session was conducted by Uni-Yoga, a private yoga school with branches all over Rio de Janeiro. When the teacher and her disciples were still in meditation, I engaged the aide, who spoke some English, in a brief conversation. He told me his name, which sounded like Iago. I asked him whether the teacher was from India. (She looked strikingly Indian. Could pass for a pretty Maharashtrian.) He said no. She was Brazilian-Indian, the local variant of American-Indians. Then he asked me whether I was from India. “Your face shows it,” he said, when I told him yes. “What is your name?” he asked. I said it, of course, with my usual words of caution: “It is too long. You won’t be able to pronounce it.” I was to learn in a few seconds that those cautionary words, usually reserved for foreigners, were not necessary in the case of this foreigner. I had to say my name only once, and he repeated it after me, with the right emphasis on each syllable: “Pra bha ka ran.” With the next question, he not only struck me as a person of intellectual curiosity, but also endeared himself to me. “What does that name mean?” he asked me. Pointing to the sun, I said: “It means him.” “Oh, you are Surya!” he exclaimed, using the Sanskrit word for the sun. That nearly floored me. I felt ashamed of myself for having underestimated him. I apologized. He dismissed my apology with a childlike smile. Shortcut to Nirvana By then, the class had come out of the meditative posture. The aide rushed to the yoga teacher and said something. From the admiring way the teacher looked at me, I figured that what he said was something good. Suddenly, I began to get nervous. “What, if the teacher thinks that, being Indian, I may know a lot about yoga? What, if she thinks that it would be a treat for her students if an Indian demonstrated a few yogic postures to them? What, if she requests me to do it?” Thoughts like these crossed my mind in split seconds. Not wanting to embarrass me, India and that venerable discipline called yoga, I waved goodbye to the teacher and her aide and resumed my jogging. More thoughts crossed my mind as I ran: “Do the yoga teacher and her aide know that this Indian knew very little yoga and that what little he knew was self-taught? More important, do they know that long ago, this Indian had found a shortcut to nirvana, which was three pegs of whiskey?” I ran faster. But made sure that my feet were firmly on the ground and that my head was far below the clouds. The young Brazilian aide to the yoga teacher had taught me their importance.