Saving yoga from patents

I had taken my son to a birthday party in Manhattan when an Israeli woman in a flowing kurta gave me a beatific smile and said; “Yoga is very interesting”. I muttered that I had no clue about yoga! She looked taken aback and blurted, “But you are Indian, right?” I patiently explained that not everyone from India was into yoga.

“I love horse riding which is what I did even when I lived in Delhi. I just never had anything to do with yoga”, I explained as the woman studied me like I was an astonishing species. Clearly, I was ruining her warm and fuzzy yoga stereotype about Indians.

The woman then told me that she taught yoga at my son’s school
and he was very good at it. Now it was my turn to be surprised. After this awkward first conversation, Dvora Furst who lives in an ashram in the East Village in Manhattan and I became friends.

She started teaching my son and four American children yoga in my house on Friday afternoons. I suppose it was all good because the kids would shriek “tiger, lotus, or downward-facing dog” when Dvora flashed yoga pose cards. Then they would bend like contortionists doing asanas. The yoga sessions always ended with the group chanting slokas around an oil diya.

Dvora is sought after as a yoga teacher in Manhattan’s schools as she has developed her own interpretation for children. Fortunately, she has no intention of seeking a yoga patent. She hates the idea of US companies saying they want to copyright yoga.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted at least 131 patents on the subject of yoga, mostly for books and yoga mats. The database of pending trademarks lists 3,700 trademarks but no specific patents on yoga routines or variations of asanas.

Of course, the Beverly Hills “bad boy” of yoga, Calcutta-born Bikram Choudhury, who owns a fleet of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys, started the patent fuss by claiming as his intellectual property, a sequence of 26 postures that his students performed in a room heated to 40 degrees Celsius. Open Source Yoga Unity filed a lawsuit against Choudhury’s ‘hot yoga’ patent and the lawsuit resulted in a confidential settlement agreement.

I still don’t have a yoga limb in my body, but agree it should be free
of absurd patents. India should ensure the US doesn’t give out patents for yoga teaching methods and routines.

As a first step, India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library has taken good aim at yoga theft by documenting 900 yoga postures for the international patent system. By doing this India is putting yoga ahead of patents and keeping it free for the world.