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Boston or Basavanagudi, Pattabhi Jois was untouched by it

Around 2 pm on May 18, 2009, God in his high heavens, in his most infinite and unfathomable wisdom, took the final decision to allow an old man to just exhale for the one last time in his 94 years on the planet, and not inhale that most vital whiff of air, the breath of life.

Yoga guru Pattabhi Jois had breathed his last.

The world of Ashtanga Yoga is unusual. It's esoteric, a strange world inhabited by men and women, so very different in thought and action from the rest of us, steeped largely in cryptic methodologies that trace their genesis back to aeons. To the time of the Puranas.

A form of yogic practice that can be assimilated and appreciated and followed only by the seriously interested and genuinely committed among the multitudes who have ever tried a hand at it. Or leg, if you will!

A world whose citizens unfailingly wake up at 4 in the morning and adhere to the tenets of yama (restraints), niyama (observances), pranayama (breath control), asanas (yogic poses), pratihara (withdrawal of the sense), dharana (concentration) and dhyana (meditation); to the precepts of individual and social discipline. Where the initiated achieve a state of mind where calm and soulful rumination tiptoe gently into their subconscious to dwell there for ever. Changing them and their perceptions of the world. For the better.

Text: Sunaad Raghuram

A fount of yogic knowledge

It is this world that Pattabhi Jois had the keys to. The keys that he earned through years and years of resolute study and practice of Ashtanga Yoga, born of an inner calling, ever since he saw a yogic demonstration at the Jubilee Hall in the nondescript town of Hassan in Karnataka, by a man named Krishnamacharya, who went on to become his guru. Jois was all of 11 years old then.

It was with this very same set of keys that Jois opened the vast door of yoga to his students who came from all parts of the world; from Boston to Basavanagudi, as it were. He made them taste for themselves the pure, fresh and sweet waters of the fount of his yogic knowledge where most other teachers tended to only loftily pontificate on the existence of a spring in the distance, without as much as allowing their students to even experience a gentle splash.

In Pattabhi Jois, indeed, there was simply no hint of the ego; no unnecessary posturing; not a sliver of braggadocio; or any existence of swaggering self-aggrandisement in the insides of his soul. No overblown or empty boasting that he knew it all.

It was simply amazing that Jois had mastered the rather arduous exercise of it all, the most difficult posture, if you will, of completely extinguishing that most persuasive of fires, the importance to the self.

Pattabhi Jois exuded equanimity, equipoise and simplicity

In a world where one invariably comes across half-baked men and women of all hues, who think that they are the makers of the universe, the cat's whiskers as it were; those who perambulate the labyrinths of an imagined sense of exaggerated self-esteem, born invariably of greed, pelf and a rather pathetic lack of the understanding of life.

The equanimity of mind, the equipoise; the simplicity that Pattabhi Jois exuded; the warmth and friendliness in his smile that was so natural to his demeanour; the child in him that surfaced time and again; that wonderfully endearing way of greeting -- 'hello, hello ,hello!' -- all whispered to you that here was a man who was fresh and uninhibited of soul.

Ananth Ramiah, one of his classmates from the Sanskrit Patashala, once gave the most perfect description of Pattabhi Jois's nature as a man. Ananth Ramiah quoted verses from the Ramayana pertaining to the appointment of Lord Rama as the heir to the throne of the great kingdom of Ayodhya and his subsequent banishment to the jungles for 14 years. The Ramayana records that Rama, upon hearing both news, was simply unmoved and unaffected. There was to him, the legendary scripture states, a certain detachment of the mind, a certain aloofness of thought that simply did not allow him to be affected in any way by either of the developments!  

So also with Pattabhi Jois. Neither during the early times in Mysore when gut-wrenching poverty snapped at his ankles like a persistent dog nor later when fame and the attendant riches came his way like damsels wanting to impress a handsome suitor, did Jois as much as blink at them!

He was oblivious of the pomp and show around him

The private jet planes of a few of his American students, the itinerant jet-setting around the globe; the reverence and the fawning with which his students received him wherever he went; the 'guruji' that he had become to them all; the many trips, travelling First Class on British Airways,  to New York, which was as different from his ancestral village of Kowshika as pretzels are from that most Kannadiga of short eats, the Kod Bale; classes with superstars Madonna, Sting and Gwyneth Paltrow; the dollars and the Rolexes; they all  happened.

But Pattabhi Jois was still, in spite of the flash bulbs and the bugles, a simple, god-fearing Brahmin from Rajaram Agrahara and later Lakshmi Puram of erstwhile Mysore, sacred thread firmly in place, the vibhuti (holy ash) smeared resplendently on his handsome forehead; always revelling in anecdotes dating back to unspoiled, royal Mysore of the 1940s, completely oblivious of the pomp and show around him, and all the adulation that stemmed from his status as an international yoga guru of such profound eminence.

Amidst the gloss and the glitter in the West, he was his own self

I had seen him walk the long cavernous halls of airports in the West amidst the gloss, the glitter, the lights and the shrill crescendo of revved up jet engines taxiing for takeoff. But he was always his own self. In his white dhoti and shirt and pump shoes.

Jois neither understood the thousand reasons his co-passengers had to be on the same plane nor did he want to know why else the world moved. To him he was on his way to New York or Los Angeles or Encinitas or Hawaii because a student had invited him to be there.

And now, the good lord himself has invited him to be with him. For ever.

In my mind, I can see Pattabhi Jois climbing up the stairway to heaven, in his trademark white dhoti and shirt. As for the pump shoes, I don't know whether they are allowed in the presence of the lord!