Q1.
Did you know that yoga has been practised in India for more than 3,000 years?
Answer
Yes — yoga is more than 3,000 years old, which means people in India were doing it long before most of the buildings, languages and countries we know today even existed. It was not invented as exercise. It was a way to keep the body healthy, the mind peaceful, and to live in harmony with oneself and with nature.
To feel how long 3,000 years is:
- You are about 10 years old.
- Your grandparents are perhaps 65 or 70.
- Three thousand years is about a hundred grandparents, one after another.
- In all those hundred lifetimes, somebody in this land was sitting down cross-legged, breathing slowly, and passing the practice on to the next person.
| What is very old in India | Roughly how old |
|---|---|
| Yoga | More than 3,000 years |
| Ayurveda, one of the oldest forms of medicine | More than 3,000 years |
| Making jaggery from sugarcane juice | Very old — India discovered it first |
| Writing down zero | Ancient India; the idea then spread across the world |
| Chilli in Indian food | Only about 400 to 500 years |
Why the last row is worth staring at: Yoga is more than 3,000 years old. Chilli is about 450 years old in India. So a practice we sent out to the world is far older than a food that feels completely Indian to us. Things go out and things come in, all the time — and after a few hundred years nobody can tell any more which was which. That is exactly the point of this chapter.
Did you know? The United Nations in 2014 declared 21 June as the International Day of Yoga. On that one day, millions of people around the world do yoga together — in parks, on beaches, in school grounds and on office roofs.