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Mmm, every few years I am given a clean slate. Meaning my old slate gets completely wiped off... Last time, in the fire I lost all my journalistic articles. I had huge folders and wads of articles, since 1986 to aound 1999, and I was prolific those days, adrenaline-junkie, crazy about words and crazy for a platform for them. I was a feature writer, those days, part of an exalted and rare breed who knew words and had style:) I suffered the rest of the bitchiness of journalism, just to be able to write. And of course, we feature writers were proud to be hated by the rest of the tribe!
Heavens knew who would have read all those yellowing wads, barring my daughter, that too possibly only after my demise, and in a moment of brief nostalgia. I remember doing that with some of my Dad's books, when he suddenly collapsed after a massive heart attack: loving his jottings and hurting from not having appreciated him more, when he was alive.
But like I said, my own huge piles of newspaper/magazine clippings had no value (even while a journo we would laff that today's news was tomorrows raddi - or toilet paper:). And a particular note, from Frank Simoes, ad guru, praising my feature on lemon yellow butterflies suddenly fluttering about in this concrete jungle as one of the most refreshing he had read for a long time in city newspapers, I was very fond of. All of it was gutted. And with that finally, my sense of myself as a journalist (or even a writer... every journo wants to be writer, wantes to write a best-seller) was buried for ever.
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Now suddenly, the blog posts vamoose and I was so amazed, it also did not really matter at all.
In fact, u can ask my husband, I was telling him that I felt that some local instructors were just copying stacks of my articles to create workshops.I had even made it easy for them, to just create a readymade yoga workshop by organising my posts under appropriate labels:) Also, I felt if some of these johnnies suddenly wake up to write a book about something they do not even practice, all they have to do is go to the labels, download all the articles and write one book on each of my well organised labels of all my blog posts. I told him, I must delete things like that which can be and is, clearly, being misused!! I believe in sharing, definitely.
Free MySpace Animations! But it also makes no sense to me that people (not practitioners) who did not feel yoga in their life or breath, were passing off what is essentially an experiential relationship I have with yoga, as theirs:) Right? So now my husband says, I had super-willed it to kill my blog as it was then!! Who knows.... like I said, and that bit has not changed, my life is entirely guided. If now, more than ever, I feel so...
About local instructors misusing, I can think of aggressive D P and lumpy M, to name a few. They used to do that before they started teaching yoga. In fact, D P, who had now progressed to issuing power yoga certificates, used to attend my dance yoga poses and desperately copy the sequences I had personally created. He would not practice, but stand aside and just copy what I was saying! Then, he even once tried to hire me (I, who, resents having to teach for a living to be bound by a ridiculous hand-cuff-type contract to a commercial unyogi yogi). I am very strict, he had the cheek to tell me. Fellows are so funny if they are not so offensive!! He said I must do all the work, use all my media contacts to promote my workshop, create all the input. And he will stand by, and take a 50 per cent cut!!
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Can u imagine what I have to deal with, sometimes?!! In fact, in all my workshops till date, the maximum attendance was from instructors. Four-fifths, every time, whatever the number. My other loyalists will crib that I was giving away complete classes and sequences and workshops to these hardly-yoga type instructors for Rs 100 or Rs 200:) I did it because I loved yoga. And because I wished for these dolts to change their mindset!!
But now, much as I love yoga ....
So, when the blog articles disappeared in ether, I wondered, whose loss it was? I never actually ever went back and read a single post. Most of what I have to say, except the cathartic nonsense I puke out here once in a while, is in any case all over the net, written in various forms and formats for several magazines...
And I am glad the rest of it is truly gone...
