'A harmony of mind and body'

Modern India is a synthesis of the old and the new, and Sachin Tendulkar is enjoying both. Tendulkar and his team-mates at the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore are learning yoga from an aerospace scientist, who believes that yoga will help them get both their bodies and their minds in shape.

"Yoga is a way of life," said SN Omkar pithily, speaking to the news agency, AFP. Omkar is a senior scientific advisor to the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the highly renowned Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. So why was he teaching yoga to cricketers?

"It has to do with the way you handle things," he said. "If applied to a cricketer it helps him beat stressful conditions on the ground and off the ground. It teaches him to keep detached. All these are very essential to a modern day sportsman."

One man who seemed to agree with Omkar was Tendulkar, who went through a series of stretching exercises with his tutor. "Yoga is not for the back or for any other injuries," Tendulkar said. "It is a very good thing to do. It can only help and cannot damage anything. So I look at it in a positive way. It is the overall mental feel. The feel-good factor helps to relax. I would recommend it to everyone."

Omkar explained how yoga helps in strenghening a sportsman's core muscles - quadriceps, back muscles and hamstrings. But he laid more stress on the mental aspect of it. He said that focussed breathing and stretching exercises create harmony of the body and the mind. "It is the balance of mind which is vital," he said. "One should never get emotionally disturbed." One testimony of Omkar's expertise would appear to be the fact that two of the most focussed and calm cricketers in the Indian side, Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble, have been regular students at Yoga Mandir, the institute he runs.

But isn't he a scientist? What does yoga have to do with science? "The training that I get in the institute has greatly enhanced my understanding of yoga," Omkar explained. "Scientific temperament adds to the way one understands the subject of yoga."