Yoga appears to be the flavour of the season, thanks to Baba Ramdev or thanks to television.

Yoga, after all, is old hat with every city and town boasting of Yoga teachers who tell you how to do asanas. There are also those who try out the gimmick of training you in ?Yoga-nidra? right at the beginning.

That exercise helps is not a secret and doctors too have no problem with the right kind of exercises being done by people. The trouble is that what is good for one set of ailments might not be suitable for other kinds of ailments. If you have both, you need to be careful and consult experts. Mass purveyors of Yoga like Baba Ramdev, however, seem to offer a uniform solution to everyone except the VIPs. Customised service and individual attention to the latter surely makes a difference.

Swami Satyananda, founder of the Bihar School of Yoga at Munger, was once a guest of R.N. Sharma, around 30 years ago, at that majestic bungalow on the station road in Ranchi, which is the official residence of the chairman cum managing director of Central Coalfields Ltd.

Swamiji was an extraordinary man but this columnist was young, not quite 20-year-old yet, and ignorant. Yours truly also had the arrogance of youth. Therefore, when Swami Satyananda softly revealed that he had taken Yoga to the mental hospitals in Scandinavian countries and which had yielded good results, the temptation to interrupt him became irresistible.

?Have you been to the mental hospitals here,? I asked him quite rudely. I was triumphant when he replied in the negative. I remember writing a rather nasty piece, suggesting that these Yogis invariably found the West more attractive because they could earn more. Why can?t they do their experiments right here at home ?

Yoga has been popular in the West for more than half a century. Bihar school of Yoga was established in 1963 and Yogoda Math was set up in Ranchi even earlier while we are discovering Baba Ramdev now! Good for us, I guess.

But my scepticism about Babas is too ingrained to make me a believer. The proliferation of Babas, I have found, is proportional to the proliferation of violence, intolerance, crime, cheating and fraud.

If they are so selfless and so effective, why can?t they heal people who cannot afford to treat themselves? Why can?t they ensure peace and harmony in the world ? Yoga, after all, does not mean that you do your asanas and then go back home to beat your wife, accept bribes, cheat your colleague, yell at employees and evade taxes.

Yoga attempts to lift your body, soul and even spirit. Non-violence, honesty, truth, contentment, cleanliness, tranquillity, austerity and awareness are some of the prescriptions found in Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, the father of Yoga, who lived in the second century BC.

Yoga, I am told, teaches you to cultivate contentment by finding happiness with what you have and with who you are?and by taking responsibility for where you are. It is an ethical blueprint, a complete change of mindset and lifestyle.

People trained in Bihar school of Yoga are apparently found all over the world, working as gurus or instructors. The profession is lucrative for those who are good communicators. It, therefore, is a good idea to make Yoga compulsory in schools. The exercise will hopefully produce some competent instructors and possibly have a good influence on students.

But why provide a monopoly to Baba Ramdev? There are other institutions, too, which can provide instructors. It is in fact curious that the Bihar School of Yoga is better known abroad than within the country. Could it be because the school shunned publicity ? Or is it just a coincidence that Baba Ramdev emerged at a time when television is penetrating deeper into the polity ?

One other point that I wish to make is the futility of making deputy commissioners into event managers. There is little justification for the deputy commissioner of Ranchi to be entrusted with the task of making arrangements for the Yoga camp, unless we assume that he has practically no work to justify his existence otherwise.

The state government could easily have encouraged a citizens? committee to organise the event and asked the deputy commissioner to be a patron and lend his weight. It is hardly a good idea to have the deputy commissioner and his team of officials occupied in a jamboree for an entire month and a half, which of course includes recuperation time.

It also appears amazing that people who manage to collect Rs 25 lakh in a matter of weeks, can make no difference to institutions like sadar hospital.

We will of course wait to see the Ramdev effect take the state forward.