It’s amusing to see powerful men fall. What’s more amusing is to find out that men that are doing so much good in the world, to the point that they achieve god-like status, have their dirty secret unfold.
That’s why I loved Wild Wild Country so much. Deep down, I am suspicious of pure men trying to change the world for the better. But I am nonetheless impressed by their ability to create an ideology that sells so well. In Wild Wild Country, the ambitious Yogi was able to make a county in Oregon, all for himself, in his name called “Rajneeshpuram”.
He could do that because he had a well-versed “reasoning” for his nascent spiritual community. His simple formula was that he was bringing the best of Indian spirituality and Western materialism together so that one can get the most out of both worlds: the material world and the spiritual world out there.
To get the most out of both, you needed to go all out. For the material part, it came in the form of sex at incredible proportions and for the spiritual part, intense meditative yoga which he being the expert from India was able to provide.
Bikram yoga
In Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (available on Netflix), the narrative is that a successful guru from India Bikram Choudhury was able to build an empire out of his brand of yoga, his namesake Bikram Yoga, and use that to his advantage for money, influence, and sex.
His specific style of yoga, known as hot yoga, involved being in a heated room with temperatures up to 105 °F/41 °C where participants performed 22 positions + 2 extra.
The series was honest to show that Bikram’s hot yoga did help many people out of their various miseries and at the same time helped many build their careers as yoga instructors by receiving certification through Bikram’s teacher trainee program.
The series did convince me that hot yoga is a valuable enough activity that I want to try it out!
The Criticisms
However, like in any storytelling, the underscore of the series is the two major criticisms against Bikram Choudhury.
1. He was dishonest about “his” invention.
The yoga asanas, his selling products, were not his original invention as he claimed to be instead those were the things he learned from his master word-to-word.
But was this wrong?
For sure, he made his master’s lessons universally available something his master could never have done.
Assuming that hot yoga is indeed as beneficial as it has been shown in the series and that his own master thought the same (i.e. hot yoga is useful), then indeed not only did Bikram do good for his master—he brought the goodness of his master’s art to the world—but also did a great service to humanity at large who made thriving careers for themselves and found hot yoga as a solution to many of their problems.
In fact, this is a quite common phenomenon that there’s someone who actually invents, then there’s someone who actually spreads and then there’s someone who actually gets credited for the work.
Bikram would have convinced nobody if he went around saying “Hey, wanna learn all the cool things I learned from my guru?”. From a marketing and capitalist point of view, he did nothing extraordinary by selling his product in his name.
2. He was predatory with women
As we learn from the series, people came for a 9-week teacher trainee program so that the studios that they represent can do business under the Bikram banner.
So these women have a strong need for him. Their career was tied to his approval 1) as an instructor and 2) as a professional qualification.
And while these events were being organized, he took advantage of this strong need and asked them to do him favors—such as massages on late-night Bollywood comfort streaming—which sometimes resulted in him raping them.
Let’s say this is indeed the truth (not hinting here that it is not). Does that make him particularly predatory? The storyline seems to say that yes it does.
He was able to amass a great number of women in one room, more specifically a hotel, for nine weeks. They were in desperate need of his course. And he, as a predator would do, took advantage of these women in need.
I do think that he was predatory when he took advantage of these women.
But he was not predatory when providing the service as a business.
It is not entirely him to blame when these women were taken advantage of since they gave him the opportunity. Think of the case of the lady agreeing to massage him at 2 AM at night and being shocked that his massage request reached the penis.
I don’t know if adult women need special training to figure out what to expect from a deep massage at 2 AM. But nonetheless, if we do want to say that the teacher trainee women take zero responsibility in his exploitation of them, then we still have to wonder why they were ok to take responsibility for their career (they didn’t want to jeopardize their career prospects) even at the expense of their body. Where was dignity?
Was there really no other option for these women? Or fascination and hero-worship of a man is just the slippery slope that humanity never seems to keep falling from.
