Description
Jyoti on CM Bhandari Indian Foreign Service (IFS)
Interviewed by Bal Ram Singh
Q1. You have been in Indian Foreign Service (IFS), an elite group of Indian diplomatic bureaucracy and an unexpected source of traditional arts of yoga, please address your inspiration and beginning of your interest in Yoga.
Ans. The first opportunity I got to learn Yoga was at the National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, Uttarakhand, India. I had joined the Indian Forest Service in March 1972 and after finishing my 2 years professional forestry training at the Indian Forest College, Dehradun, I was at the Academy in Mussoorie for the combined administrative training of 4 months duration. Yoga was one of several other options for physical training and I had opted for it. Two trainers from Sivananda Asrama, Rishikesh trained us for one hour daily in the morning for two months durning April-May 1974. The entire forcus on physical fitness through Asanas, Pranayama and Dhyana.
At that time, Yoga was yet not so commonly practiced in India as most of India lived in villages where daily life was still a struggle for survival. We had no knowledge of classical Astanga Yoga but we lived by it every day in Joint Family traditions. I changed to Indian Foreign Service in July 1974 and came to Dehli but continued in my family traditions for the next twenty years, never aware that I was following classical Yogic Life of Karama-yoga and Bhaki-yoga, which I received more as family tradition than as modern Yoga practice. My parent's generation and forefathers living in Himalayan villages, were not doing Yogic postures but they were classical Yogis living a life of Karma-yoga, Dhyana-yoga and Gyana-yoga as propogated through Bhagavadgita and the Upanisads.
