There are times in a person’s life when mental equilibrium can be almost impossible to find; and now is such a time for me. There is a man who has lied, cheated, run away and hidden in fridges, stolen journalist’s phones and held talks with the US about our public services, and still enough people are planning to vote for his party to enable him to be Prime Minister. Devastating cuts to public services are not enough to change their minds, nor are threats to the NHS, nor cowardice in the face of Andrew Neil (who, to his credit, did his best to shame Johnson into being interviewed.) Nope, the nation wants this guy and apparently the phrase GET BREXIT DONE, when repeated often enough, is sufficient to overturn all this. I simply cannot believe a single person would vote for him, let alone millions. It makes me wonder what has happened to the world.
It is essential to one’s mental well-being to have a break from all this, and yesterday I took the train down to Leicester to look round the shops and visit a friend in hospital. It was a horrid day, windy and wet, but nevertheless a welcome break and I was able to buy a couple of pressies; however I was less than gruntled to find a TV in the waiting room blasting out a speech by our glorious leader, necessitating a scramble for earphones and music.
Grr.
It’s been a week for egotistical males, as last night we watched a documentary about Bikram Choudhury, the founder of Bikram yoga. I have long been sceptical about this form of yoga as it seems to embody the most anti-yogic characteristics of competitiveness and greed. I was outraged to hear that Bikram was trying to copyright asanas (postures) which he did not invent but which derive from ancient texts and practices and belong to everyone. He did not succeed but the attempt embodies the very worst of capitalism.
Despite studying under his own guru, Bikram seems to have known nothing of the ethical side of yoga; the do’s and don’ts or yamas and niyamas which also come from the ancient texts and include such practices as ahimsa, non-violence; aparigraha, non-greed and most importantly brahmacharya, sexual abstinence or, for those in relationships, sexual continence. This was the most disturbing of the accusations levelled against him; that he did, Weinstein-like, invite young women to massage him and sexually assaulted them in his room. He is also accused of several rapes but has refused to testify.
Sadly the US equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service has declined to make this a criminal case in spite of the wealth of evidence against him, leaving plaintiffs to pursue their own civil cases. Bikram is in the same mould as Trump and Johnson and is still at large running courses in Mexico.
The film is well worth watching for the massive size of Bikram’s ego and for the way he quite literally stands on the backs of his students as they are performing asanas. And unless we vote him out, we can now look forward to five more years of Boris Johnson doing the same thing to the country.
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 