Stuff. It simply bothers me. It never used to, a few years ago. The first time it felt plain dumb to have Stuff was when I had to downsize my apartment into two suitcases a couple of years ago. It took me a while to sell and give away things that I owned, so I could fit all my belongings in just two suitcases to move from San Francisco to Bangalore. While I managed to downsize, I also had a connecting flight to India from Singapore. There was no issue flying from San Francisco to Singapore. I travel happy in South east Asia and when I try hopping onto the plane to Bangalore, I am told I can only take half of what I have brought with me. Nightmare indeed.

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A few yogi friends of mine and I got curious about Yoga Makaranda and decided to find it. After a long and hard search for it, we did find Yoga Makaranda. Along with that we also happened to find Yogasanagalu. Both these books are written in Kannada. I happened to leave a comment on a yoga blog about it. Little did I know that I would be flooded with requests for copies of those books. So, I want to leave a note on my blog that I will not be posting those pictures here in this blog or will be mailing the copies of these books to anyone. I am sure KYM or some organization will publish those books if so many people are interested in it. I do not want to disrespect any copyrights that come with these books. If I find time, I will write a Wikipedia article for these books.

I picked up Stiff from Vancouver Public Library. Stiff by Mary Roach has been around for a few years, but I got to it only now as I noticed it on a display case. The book must be very popular, as it is still distributed under “Fast Reads”, meaning I can only borrow it for 7 days, no renewals and one dollar late fee for each day. 3 weeks is the time for any other not so popular book.

This book about the curious lives of human cadavers is definitely a fast read. Mary Roach is a hilarious writer. She is not the medical types, but a writer for salon types. I had simply not thought about so many things about dead bodies until I read this book. I was surprised to find out what people and the medical community did with cadavers.

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I found this book in a google search and got it from my local library. The book by Jim Johnson is really small and has some good advice. The exercises prescribed to cure less-than-perfect knee joint are simple and precise. There are many reasons why a knee starts to hurt. Short muscles in the leg, lower hip flexibility, weak quads, arthritis and many more besides the hockey injuries, falls, road accidents or tears in the various ligaments of the knee.

One of the interesting points is that either weak quads lead to poor knees or that the poor knees lead to weak quads. The author says, no matter what is causing the other one to perform badly, the solution is simple. Start strengthening the quads which eventually improves the knees. Most of the time, an injury or an issue with the knee starts to waste or weaken the quads.

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I was meaning to read this book since high school, but never got to do it until now. Better late than never, as the saying goes. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Gandhi’s experiments.  This post is not a book review, I cannot do justice to the book. Although the book is about experiments with truth, ahimsa is also featured extensively. Every yogi must read this book, for Satya and ahimsa are the highlights of this book and Gandhi’s life. One can get the true meaning of what Ahimsa is.

This book is simple, humble and quite chatty. You get to know Gandhi at such a personal level. This book was first released in 1925, it does not cover all of Gandhi’s life. It stops when his life has become completely public, so the actual nonviolent fight for freedom is not covered. This book covers his childhood, education in England, his life in South Africa and a few years after he returned to India. I am impressed with the little details he mentions that goes all the way back while he was in his teens or a kid. The book was written when he was serving a prison sentence.

Ahimsa as Gandhi explains is the same as the yogic definition. It means non-hurting, non-violence in thoughts, action and speech. Interestingly, he does not mention the word ahimsa when he explains his dietetic experiments not to eat anything related to animals. Every time, he mentions ahimsa, it is always in the context of hurting or torturing someone’s feelings by one’s behavior.

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I am moving from Patanjali’s India to the current day. Fast forward, some five thousand years. This is a review of one of my favorite books Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani. All of you yogis and others that claim to be interested in India and is beyond the curiosity of what is the meaning of the red dot on an Indian woman’s forehead will find this book interesting.

This is Nandan Nilekani’s first book. But, it is brilliant for someone who is not a writer and is a business entrepreneur. He says if he had not met Narayan Murthy, he would have been a techie (boring!) living in New Jersey suburbs (boring boring!), taking the train to Manhattan. Am I glad he met Narayan Murthy and that he wrote this book.

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I picked up this book written by Paul Brunton at Sri Ramanashram, Tiruvannamalai. It is one of the best yoga related books that I have ever read. It is about PB’s search in India to find the great men in India who have figured the mysteries of life a.k.a yogis or seers or rishees.

The year is 1931, pre independence India. PB being a journalist makes for a wonderful travel writer. The search is on for a few good men. It is definitely not easy as he keeps coming across well intentioned fools, scriptural slaves, jugglers with a few tricks and outright frauds. He travels across many parts of India, talking to so many people. Of course, he needs interpreters as he is an English man. He makes friends with people who help him out most of the time.

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