It was a cold December afternoon in Western Massachusetts, and I was scribbling furiously on an evaluation form. I had looked forward to these few minutes all semester long.

The diminutive professor and I had locked horns pretty much the minute we met. Like many of my friends taking the course, I was part repulsed by her arrogance and part tantalized by her boundless intelligence. I resented the workload of 450 pages of reading the first week and came to dread her comments on my papers. I was strictly in the anti camp where she stood and held my own in bashing her teaching style and content.

So you received some bad news today. A cherished dream crumbled in an afternoon, and your own body was complicit in fooling you that bliss was close at hand. You had wanted this more than anything else, so how could you fail to get it?

The Ashram Diary Series is back! Please check our archives if you missed the last four installments of the series. They are excerpted from the diary of your blogger from her month at a yoga ashram in South India in September. 

 

A few weeks back, I had a meltdown. Duly worried, my friends paused their busy days, and the emergency meeting was held at my friend’s apartment to which another friend came up the stairs issuing orders down her Blackberry. They would have held my head over the sink if I let them but a few hours of quality girl-time and it was time to wash my face and get my act together.

The greatest love story I know belongs to my grandmother.

One Addis morning in the early 1930s, the bold 16-year-old was getting ready for her wedding. She looked out to the two men standing apart from her relatives and prayed that her new husband was the handsomer one of the pair as indeed he was. 

An old friend was recently visiting me in Addis on his ‘r& r ‘ from South Sudan. Among the amenities of Juba which, thanks to aid money, is apparently growing like something out of the Gold Rush, he mentioned a strip club his buddies introduced him to. ‘South Sudanese women? ’ I asked, knowing the answer. Of course not. The strippers are Ethiopians.

In September, your blogger attended a Yoga Instructors’ Course at an ashram outside Bangalore in South India. The following is excerpted from the diary she kept during her stay at the ashram.

Third-World Advantage

It’s been a week and the German woman has stopped asking everyone if their room has a shower. Some of the fairer members of the group have had a lot of getting used to do. They complain that there is hot water only at 4.30am (and in the evenings too, it later turns out) while I, fresh from the kiremt of power-cuts in Addis have no problem with cold showers. I am comfortable barefoot and I obviously have no problem eating with my fingers. I love Indian food and prove I can live on it, at least for one month. I am already a semi- vegetarian, and I have no beef (no irony intended) with flying objects in my room, as long as they are of reasonable size. I have seen cockroaches before. I am actually quite smug at my level of comfort here and chalk one up to what I call the Third-World Advantage.

In September, your blogger attended a Yoga Instructors’ Course at an ashram outside Bangalore in South India. The following is excerpted from the diary she kept during her stay at the ashram.

Karma Yoga: Diminishing Your Ego One Failed Chapatti at a Time

So this week, my team’s assignment for karma yoga is cleaning the main hall. After a couple of weeks of weed-pulling and slicing vegetables with dull knives, there are some mutterings of ‘this is pointless work’ making the rounds. I am tempted to agree when the hallway that I swept yesterday looks like it has not seen a broom in months after several hundred pairs of feet have trampled on it during the morning assembly. 

I smile as I watch the ICU doctor from New York daintily dangle his broom while he studies the dirty floor he has just been assigned to clean. I note that there is no allocation of tasks according to status or ability and it suddenly occurs to me that the fact that this is pointless work is the point. ‘Karma’ means action and students are assigned to menial, maintenance-type tasks at random and on purpose; pointless work is meant to diminish your ego. As women have been finding out for centuries, maintenance work is back-breaking, boring as hell and has to be done tomorrow all over again. It’s usually unpaid. It is probably the most unrewarding activity you could do with your time but somebody’s gotta do it, and this week, it’s the ICU doctor from New York. 

As there is no real output and all assignments are given to groups, the temptation to not pull your weight is sometimes too strong to ignore. Some of my group members do nothing at all during karma-hour or they pick up a few pieces of trash and spend the rest of the time talking to the slackers from other groups. There’s a girl in my group who has never served lunch with us, not a single time. It gets to me but as I am practicing giving my tongue a rest while I am here, I am just going to sweep, serve and see what karma will bring. 

Speaking of serving lunch, my debut was quite memorable although apparently only to me. Assigned to bring a bucket of rice from the kitchen, my bare feet slipped on the floor which is almost always wet from the constant mopping, and I fell flat on my butt with my braids diving straight into the bucket of rice. I was the only one who laughed. 

Talk about diminished ego.

From what I can see, the ashram staff are on the fence about this whole karma yoga business. On the one hand, they quite enjoy watching pampered students toil and scrape dried food from their linoleum floors. They also like being in a position to order us to do whatever grabs their fancy like the sadistic Kitchen Bhaya yelling out ‘slowly, slowly’ as my friend Pranav and I scour the staircase which he had decided, five minutes before we were due to leave must be done today, although the layers of grime suggest that the stairs could have stood to not be cleaned for another day. On the other hand, there are Karma Yoginis like me who waste their chappati patties which is not as much fun.

The latter incident took place after I finally bonded with Teacher Didi when she descended into the depths of the kitchen to teach me to make chapattis. We talked and she finally learnt my name. 
She left me to the capable hands of the Kitchen Didi and did not have to witness all my mickey mouse-shaped chapatti patties being thrown aside with the Kitchen Didi yelling ‘waste!” very loudly. I am apparently unable to produce the most basic shape with a pin roll. Seriously diminished ego. I skip over the chapattis at lunch that day as I obviously don’t deserve them. 

In September, your blogger attended a Yoga Instructors’ Course at an ashram outside Bangalore in South India. The following is excerpted from the diary she kept during her stay at the ashram.

In September, your blogger attended a Yoga Instructors’ Course at an ashram outside Bangalore in South India. The next ten blogs will feature excerpts of the diary she kept during her the course.