When the drones hum over the improvised cremation grounds of Delhi, what will the conspiritualist see in the livestream—if they even look? Will their Orientalist spell, fixated on fire ceremonies and mantras, finally be broken? In our interview this week, Matthew speaks with sociologist Sheena Sood about the hubris of Hindu nationalism as its yoga-boosting ministers show their pious ineptitude, telling their gasping citizens to stop being crybabies and consider drinking holy cow urine against COVID.What about when other supposed zealots show their sell-out colors? Austin’s biohacking guru, Aubrey Marcus just sold his hipster supplement company to Unilever, of all companies. Derek breaks down the insanity of the COVID-contrarian set taking the buyout from the big-Ag, big-Pharm mack daddy. Julian looks at how, in the very same week, Marcus’s biz partner Joe Rogan, excuses his vax-hesitant comments by admitting he’s a moron. But isn’t the joke on us?Priests and punks, preaching spirit and stockpiling cash. When will this be over?Show NotesSuper-spreader events in IndiaMaha Kumbh Mela 2021Oxygen express trains in IndiaWaiving Vaccine Patents at the WTOAnti-Vax Firebombing in ItalyAubrey Marcus announces Unilever saleArt of Manliness Podcast #93: Total Human Optimization With Aubrey MarcusA British Skin Care Brand Pressured Asian Influencers To Promote Its Skin Whiteners. They Fought Back.Unilever South Africa to pull all TRESemmé products for 10 days over racist adWorld must tell India’s government to stop religious gatherings during COVIDOxygen Express trains deliver supplies as India hit by covid-19 surge
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels, such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and previously Clubhouse.
I'm going to be taking about a month off from Clubhouse and we'll see how it goes.
Now that I'm fully vaccinated, I'm going to be seeing some family on weekends and have a work trip coming up, getting back out into life.
So we'll check back in on Clubhouse.
In June, if possible, but you can also check us out on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for as little as $5 a month, you can support us and get access to our Monday bonus episodes as well as our weekend bonus content.
Conspirituality 50 sellouts and zealots with Sheena Sood.
When the drones hum over the improvised cremation grounds of Delhi, what will the conspiritualists see in the live stream, if they even look?
Will their Orientalist spell fixed on fire ceremonies and mantras finally be broken?
In our interview this week, Matthew speaks with sociologist Sheena Sood about the hubris of Hindu nationalism as its yoga-boosting ministers show their pious ineptitude, telling their gasping citizens to stop being crybabies and consider drinking holy cow urine against COVID.
What about when other supposed zealots show their sellout colors?
Austin's biohacking guru, Aubrey Marcus, just sold his hipster supplement company to Unilever, of all companies.
Derek breaks down the insanity of the COVID contrarian set taking the buyout from the Big Ag Big Farm Mac Daddy.
I'm going to look at how, in the very same week, Marcus's business partner Joe Rogan excuses his vaccine-hesitant comments by admitting he's a moron.
But isn't the joke on us?
In the jab, I'll also be looking at vaccine patents and anti-vax terrorism.
Priests and punks preaching spirit and stockpiling cash.
When will this be over?
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
I hesitate to say it, but I do not despise Joe Rogan.
His statements about vaccines last week were appallingly ill-informed and irresponsible.
In case you live outside of his epic broadcast range, he said that if you're young and healthy and exercising all the time, you should skip the vaccine.
Rogan responded later to the ensuing uproar by quickly walking those statements back and calling himself a moron who people shouldn't listen to.
But people are listening, dude.
That's the whole point.
Though hard data is not readily accessible, in 2019, you said, Joe, that you were getting 190 million downloads per month.
Remember?
Rogan pioneered the improvised long-form podcast and that open-ended style made him a multimillionaire.
It's podcasting 1.0, so the perhaps version 2 or 3.0 that we, hopefully, and many of our peers do now with a more careful journalistic or analytical focus.
There's something about his personality and conversational style, though, that has attracted an extraordinary variety of guests over the last 12 years, from Kanye West to Cornell West, Bernie Sanders to Ben Shapiro, Edward Snowden to Alex Jones, Sean Carroll to Miley Cyrus, Richard Edward Snowden to Alex Jones, Sean Carroll to Miley Cyrus, Richard Dawkins to Andrew Dice Clay, Crystal Ball to Candace Owens, Neil deGrasse Tyson to Itty Izzard, Jamie Foxx to Abby I could do this all day but you get the idea.
His guests do slant heavily male, which is unsurprising, but the ideological spectrum is broad and the topics diverse.
I personally dislike and disagree with many of his guests, but I still do appreciate the relaxed and intimate context in which they at times are given enough rope to hang themselves on their superficiality, paranoia, or bigotry.
Other guests, though, have fascinating and insightful things to say.
Rogan's format has exposed right-wingers like Dave Rubin, Candace Owens, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, and even Alex Jones in ways that no one else has been able to, precisely because it's not so much an interview with an agenda and canned responses as a venue for open, spontaneous discussion.
Now the stats say he does three to five shows a week recorded live and averaging 2.5 hours each.
This has created over 4,600 hours of content featuring 866 guests so far.
Now, by contrast, guys, the three of us often debate for two or three weeks on Slack about whether or not to have one specific guest on the show later that month.
So on the one hand, look, it's valid to say that this 1.0 model creates quick turnaround, live-recorded, unedited, high-volume content.
It has flourished due to its very broad, casual, hit-and-miss improvised approach.
But the pertinent question for me is this.
What happens now that Joey's creative little project started in his garage is rivaling old media news sources?
What happens now that a few grossly misinformed sentences about vaccines become an international news item and get discussed in the White House press room and then rebutted by Tony Fauci?
Culturally, the times are moving very quickly.
This is only amplified by the pandemic.
The political atmosphere is as polarized as it is supercharged.
At his level of popularity and influence, everything is consequential and everything is seen.
I think Joe started off bullshitting with his buddies in 2009, promoting whichever sponsor would pay for a spot and creating alliances based more on their exposure value than any actually shared values.
It's the libertarian entrepreneurial Wild West style of early social media gold rush, and Joe's net worth is a reflection of leveraging exposure to cash in on ad revenue and the opportunism of questionable workout supplements and nootropic brain fuel sales to his demographic.
When he signed last year to Spotify, the Joe Rogan experience added $20 billion to the value of that company.
And then his move to Austin also pulled many people in his professional orbit along for the ride.
And while Rogan himself has not been a significant vector for conspiritualism, and I do not actually see him as a right-wing figure, many of those riding his coattails do fit those descriptions.
So, I just want to say this.
You've arrived.
You're the big dog.
You're richer than God.
You're living the dream.
The self-replicating machine elves of the DMT dimension probably sing your name.
What if the next phase of your career was defined by becoming more selective, more well-informed, more judicious about which topics you're not qualified to spout off on?
What if, as you have said, in addition to refusing return to certain guests whom you have identified as disingenuous grifters, like Dave Rubin, you do the same with guests that you or your staff or a staff member that you perhaps trust have identified as actual political extremists?
While you may, in your own words, be the drunk or stoned moron who people shouldn't listen to on certain topics, they really are listening.
And it's a whole new world, bro.
Well, Julian, let's just wait because there's a clip that just dropped this morning.
I'm fucked right now.
Canada's juiced.
They're so locked down, and I don't understand why they think that's good.
I don't understand why they think that's the solution.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, we're dealing with an America in weird spots, right?
Like, America has states, and each state has a different approach.
And Florida's got one approach, and California has another.
Opposite sides of the country, like literally polar opposite sides of the ideologies.
And Florida's doing fucking way better.
I was just in Florida, and it's like nothing's happening.
Like, maybe you'll get sick, maybe you won't.
But we're out here with no masks on, 15,000 people in the fucking arena for the UFC fights, it was madness.
It was crazy.
It was powerful, it was really good.
But I'm like, hey guys, take your vitamin D, sleep, drink water, let's go.
Let's go.
Canada, you can't do what you're doing when you have fucking Gestapo pulling people over for your papers.
Why are you out?
Why are you out of the house?
They're doing a lot.
There's a cold floating around.
Why are you out of the house?
There is.
There's a lot of, you know, overreaction.
There's a lot of overreaction.
There's a government, you know, shout out to Doug Ford.
You're a piece of shit.
I just got to say, fuck this guy, Rogan.
Florida's doing fine.
Like because what?
He could go out to fight night and he called COVID.
A cold.
A cold.
Right there.
Right, right, right.
So, Florida has 164 deaths per 100,000 people.
That's just under the average of US deaths at 176 per 100,000 due to COVID.
The Canadian death rate per 100,000 is 65.
Canada's juiced though.
They're juiced, man.
of US deaths at 176 per 100,000 due to COVID.
The Canadian death rate per 100,000 is 65. - Canada's juiced though, they're juiced, man, they're fucked. - That guy is Matty Matheson.
I didn't know about him until today, but actually I knew about him in a kind of roundabout way because he's a Toronto guy.
He ran three really good restaurants in the progressive liberal core of downtown at the heart of the real foodie renaissance going back about 15 years now.
There was a restaurant that I used to go to called La Palette in Kensington, and I think I recognize him, actually, coming out and saying hi to the table or something like that.
Anyway, there's no fucking police Gestapo checks.
We've got a conservative mini-Trump premier who's done everything he can to actually mock down, instead of lock down, to keep things open as much as he possibly can, to ignore his public health officials.
But then, like every populist, he freaked out when the cases started to soar last month, and instead of following actual medical advice, he gave the cops authorization to stop travelers.
So that's what, you know, Rogan might be referring to, but of course he doesn't actually look anything up to understand that the very next day, police departments from around the province said, fuck you to the Premier, we're not going to do that.
And that turned the attention back to where it belonged, which is on how to financially incentivize at-risk workers to stay at home until the cases recede.
So anyway, I appreciate that we're on a podcast where you can pretty much know that I'm going to have a different take than you, Julian, and that that's invited.
So yeah, this is part of my thing, but I've got some other things to say too.
Well, let me just say I had not heard that clip yet, and that clip pisses me off immensely, and I renege on any of the positive things I may have said.
Well, I'll chime in because I've listened to hundreds of hours of Rogan, so I'm more in your camp on that, Julian, in that I was a fan.
But it makes me think of what happened this week with Facebook and Trump and deciding whether or not to let him in, how they shunted it off to a oversight board, which was bullshit to begin with.
And the oversight board came back and said, actually, this is on you.
And so, which is exactly what Facebook didn't want to happen.
And that's the perpetual problem with Facebook is they never want to take responsibility for what's on their platform.
And that's one of the challenges of Everyone having a blog, everyone having a social media account, everyone having a podcast is that there is those old guardrails that the traditional media sources have to abide by are no longer there.
And the problem is that the people monetizing their content just think that I'm just a moron.
You know, if you listen to me, it's your fault.
You can drink bleach, but that's on you.
It's I just said it.
But he doesn't.
He's never, ever taken responsibility for the influence.
And he's had this influence for a long time.
And his response to this has always been, I'm just a moron.
But that is not... If you're getting a $100 million deal and you've just sold a company, which I'll get to in a few minutes, for probably also that kind of money, at what point do you take responsibility?
Let me just say too, before the Spotify deal, the estimates I saw was that he was making about $800,000 an episode.
You know, Julian, you said that he was podcasting 1.0, but I don't know about that because if we trace the vibe back to its real root, I am not that familiar with Rogan because the whole The whole thing kind of makes, the whole setup, the whole tone of it, it all kinds of, it just puts me off, it makes me ill.
But it reminds me, it leads back to talk radio and figures like Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.
Rogan even has a little bit on how, you know, that he does on how Stern paved the way for, you know, people like him based upon free speech ideology.
And the basic rules of this kind of improvised setup are long-form, locker-roomy-type monologues or conversations in which things can be serious but also flip into irony at the drop of a hat.
And so, you know, if there's baseline misogyny or cruelty or homophobia in the room, that has the plausible deniability of entertainment.
And criticism can be rejected as political correctness.
So anyway, that's the structural framework I see Rogan sliding into, benefiting from, and kind of perfecting in a way.
And he also, I mentioned this earlier on Slack when we were talking about this clip, but he's in a different category than a lot of the characters that we discuss in that when we talk about the disinformation dozen, for example, they are generally monetizing the fears around COVID.
Rogan isn't really doing that.
He doesn't need it, first of all.
You could get it, like Alex Jones' wife once said, once he started making money, he got addicted to it and just kept wanting to make money.
And I don't know anything about that with Roy.
You could have that, for example.
But when you have People like Christiane Northrup, who got booted off of Instagram and now came back after saying, I've been censored and now she has another account.
When you have people losing their lifelines to their downlines, they are very financially incentivized.
And Rogan, he isn't.
At this point, he's got to have enough money for him and his family for the rest of their lives.
So which makes me which which changes the way that he presents that information.
That's my broader point in that he's just playing the the locker room guy.
Yeah, I just this is bullshit and he can get away with it because in some ways he really isn't invested in that in any capacity other than his real personal beliefs about the topic.
Well, he's invested in the politics of entertainment is what I think it is.
And I and I think the fact that he goes from the vaccine comments to making a bullshit about Canada during lockdown shows me that, I mean, they're smart.
There's a huge staff there.
They're looking at numbers.
He's got to be looking at returns on the quote unquote vaccine controversy as being attractive to the brand.
And that's probably what he's going to run with.
I mean, it's not a surprise.
It's not a surprise that he shoots off his mouth around, like, the most important keyword in human concern right now on the planet.
Like, why wouldn't he yak about vaccines?
It's where the heat is.
I hear that.
And I think there's a there's a strong possibility you're right.
I also.
Doubt that he thinks things through as much as that.
Yeah, when you say he's got a big staff, I mean, if you mean the Spotify staff, I don't know how much, if any, oversight there is.
So he has Brian doing everything, and then I don't know what other staff members he has.
He has schedulers and stuff, but I don't think there's a serious fact-checking process going on.
No, not fact-checking.
I'm not talking about fact-checking.
No polling.
Right.
Like how did how did that do?
How did that did that clip about vaccines yank up numbers in some way?
I don't think he does that.
Maybe, you know, it's possible.
You know, I work in media or in some capacity and we track everything.
And right.
Forecasting is a big part of like working for a startup.
But he's not really a startup.
And I just don't I don't know.
I don't know.
And here's the thing.
Since, since he moved to Spotify, I think Spotify has taken down something like 43 episodes from his catalog.
So he moved his whole catalog over there and Spotify is going through and being like, Oh shit, we can't have this up.
We can't have this up.
We can't have this up.
Let's talk about that.
Let's talk about that.
Hold on a second, but hold on a second.
Um, he may not be, uh, officially podcasting 1.0, um, but, but perhaps on YouTube he is in terms of running that long format thing on, on YouTube.
But, I think the thing that is perhaps relevant is that it starts off as I'm a comedian, and these are all my buddies who are comedians, and there's this art form called improvisation where you egg each other on to try and say the most outrageous thing to try and find creatively interesting and novel content that's going to get a big response from audiences.
I think there's much more of that kind of sensibility than there is any kind of journalistic ethos.
I suppose this is why when he has Gavin McInnes on twice, founder of the fucking terrorist group, Proud Boys, like he has them on twice.
And my understanding is that he didn't know that Proud Boys wasn't really founded the first time.
But and Rogan didn't kind of check it out the second time.
But this was after the FBI had ID'd the group as a terrorist organization.
And he hadn't and Rogan hadn't looked into it.
It's completely unconscionable that he had him on the second time.
The first time is ignorant stupidity.
The second time is, you know, I guess what you're saying is that is that is that this kind of like we're entertainers and we are comedians and we're playing off of each other plays into him being able to say, oh, well, I thought Gavin was kind of a joker and kind of just a shit poster.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's a comedian.
You haven't listened to him.
I mean, he had Alex Jones on what this last fall, which I know Spotify is one of the episodes they pulled.
That's post Sandy Hook.
That's post 9-11 truth or by Jesus Christ.
And the way that he the way that he frames it is like, oh, Alex is my old friend.
You know, he just he's Alex, whatever.
We're just going to talk.
That's exactly his attitude toward it.
And as I said, in this environment and given what we're going to get to today about what's happening in India, it's a call covid a cold.
It's so, it's so tone deaf.
One of the greatest challenges of this podcast is trying to identify where lines are drawn.
And so to some wellness influencers, vaccines are toxic agents of control that will alter your DNA and enslave you to a capitalist overlord, even if some of the people screaming toxicity take no issue injecting Botox into their faces in the quest for perpetual youth, never realizing that the tox means something.
Much of the natural versus man-made argument is a myth.
Chemistry is chemistry.
Plenty of plants are poisonous to us even in their natural form.
But some are able to dance in the imaginary gray zone between organic and pharmaceutical, which brings us to Aubrey Marcus.
Now, over a decade ago, the Austin-based trust fund kid founded Onnit alongside Joe Rogan.
The brand, marketed as promoting total human optimization, skyrocketed to fame thanks in large part to Rogan's star, when the stated goal of Onnit exploits many buzzwords.
We are on a mission to empower as many individuals as possible with a holistic philosophy regarding physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.
Now, Onnit also espouses science in its holistic sales pitch, promising that their products are backed by clinical research, even though supplements aren't required to show any proof of efficacy whatsoever.
And that was Rogan's big pitch, that Onnit went and did the research anyway.
Like Julian, I was a longtime listener, so I heard him pitched AlphaBrain, their main offering, often.
And that particular product, which is their biggest seller, is purported to, quote, support cognitive functions including memory, mental speed, and focus, end quote.
Or, as Rogan once said about AlphaBrain, I feel like it helps me form better sentences.
What, like I am a moron?
Here's what the research actually concludes.
This is from the paper that he was pointing toward.
Quote, results of the eight-week study indicate modest improvement performance in verbal memory for those participants taking As compared to those randomized placebo who showed no such improvement, none of the other cognitive domains assessed demonstrated significant time-by-group interactions over the study period."
Now, only a few sentences later, the team writes, quote, while small, the significant improvement in verbal memory demonstrated in this study are consistent with prior research that has examined the cognitive benefits of several individual nootropics found in alpha brain, trademark.
And I keep saying the trademark, because remember, this is a clinical scientific paper, and AlphaBrain is all capitalized in trademark.
As usual.
This is unlike any other study I've read, because they usually proceed with caution, stating that more research needs to be done, not saying that because these ingredients have been shown, we'll just say, fuck it, this should be good for you.
Now, to be fair, the conclusion does state that these results need to be replicated, which I don't believe they have been because I looked over all of Onnit's website and there was no proof of that.
But then you discover that two authors of this study both received funds for consulting with Onnit and that the entire study was funded by... anyone?
Onnit?
Hey!
All right.
In fact, when creating AlphaBrain, which was formulated by Marcus's stepmother, Janet Zand, a homeopathic acupuncturist... Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Homeopathic acu... Does she not use needles?
She uses very, very tiny needles.
No, no, no.
They can't be needles at all, right?
Janet Zand.
Years ago, I took her zinc, like, whatever, because they were in Whole Foods.
Yeah, yeah.
So that's his stepmother.
And then she formulated it.
And then Marcus stated that the last piece was really getting a strong medical advisory team and scientific team that's been running our clinical trials.
Now, building a science team to run your trials that you're paying for isn't how science works.
But for Marcus, it paid off because last week Onnit was sold to Unilever, the multinational consumer goods company that produces Hellman's mayonnaise, popsicles, Q-tips, a variety of dishwasher detergents and soaps, and is also the world's largest ice cream manufacturer, which made me wonder, how did the Austin vortex of anti-vaxxing, immune system-shaming wellness influencers react to this news?
Remember, this is the same crew who often say that COVID-19 mostly affects fat people, and if you're fat, that's your fault.
So surely a brand espousing holistic lifestyles being sold to one of the largest multinational corporations in the world wouldn't go over well.
But of course it did.
Because all of this influencing has never been about science, it's never been about being holistic.
It's always been about money, because it always is.
So, announcing the sale on Instagram, Marcus wrote, quote, Out of all of the potential buyers, Unilever stood out.
While no one is perfect, they really understand leading with purpose.
And I couldn't possibly have greater resonance with the leaders on the team that we will be working with.
The principal was even at Burning Mirror the year I met my wife.
Synchronicity!
So Marcus goes on to extol their environmental focus, though incredibly he overlooked the fact that Unilever's Palm Oil supplier participates in slave and child labor.
And despite assurances, a PR campaign insisting the company was looking into it, five years later the supplier continues destroying ecosystems in poor nations.
Now, Interleavers also had repeated race issues including forcing an Indian editor to promote its skin whiteners and more recently running ads that state African black hair is frizzy and dull and dry and damaged while a white woman's hair is normal.
So in the post, this is how Marcus phrases it.
They are helping support racial justice, among other things, by helping pass legislation to prevent racial based hair discrimination in the workplace.
So that black folks have normal hair, right?
So they don't get discriminated.
No, no.
When I looked over the years of Unilever scandals, what I found was when they got called out, all of a sudden they started funding things that was the antithesis of what they got called out for.
And that's exactly because this was just in November that the skin whitening and the hair ad, December the hair ads.
So that's how they do business.
Now, let's pull back.
I love a good underdog story such as a positive brand built from nothing achieving success.
And a great exit is inspirational.
Again, I work for startups like it's my world and exits are wonderful, but On It is not that story.
It was founded by a kid coming from oil money who likes to play spiritual.
And even Marcus admits that he started a marketing company before building on it.
And while some of their products might be great, and I own one of their maces and I work out with it, the company has been more hype than science the entire time.
Can I just pause?
Their mace?
Their maces?
A mace?
What the fuck are you talking about?
Like, it's a take, you're going to love this, it's a take on one of those old, like, Viking, like, you know, the clubs that have the spikes on the end?
With spikes?
Right.
It doesn't have a spike.
It's just an offloading, loading tool.
So it's a 15 pound mace.
It's like a kettlebell that's shaped like a little bat, right?
Got it.
No, that's an Indian club.
It's long.
It's about three Oh, wow.
So, the very end has most of the weight on it, and then the rest of it is the bar.
And so, as you move it away from your body, you're forcing your abdominal muscles, your posterior muscles, to pull it back.
So, it's a great instrument.
And they brought it back.
I mean, I'll give it to them.
So, again, awesome.
You need some Viking workout equipment, Matthew.
I can hook you up.
All right.
Yeah, thanks.
Nootropics are just next-generation homeopathic lozenges, literally.
That's in part how Zan made her fortune, as I mentioned.
So when reading that post and scrolling through the list of high-profile gurus virtually high-fiving Marcus on his feed, you realize that at the end of the day, all the spiritual posturing, all the talk about service and compassion and self-realization quickly fades when money enters the picture.
So destroy an ecosystem in Papua New Guinea, force children to work for free in Singapore, and pressure women in India to sell products to children that make them look whiter.
So long as the Austin elite can speak better sentences, that's all that really matters.
That's a great rundown, Derek.
You know, I have this love-hate relationship with feeling validated on this podcast.
Like at first blush, I didn't know anything about Onnit until I think you brought it to my attention.
But you know, it was pretty clear to me what it was on about, you know, supplements for the beautiful people, brain juice for bros.
But you point out the abject hypocrisy of selling out to Unilever.
You know, purveyors of junk food and junk cosmetics around the world, and also, like, pharmaceuticals.
So everything that this movement says that they reject, but they'll, of course, they'll take the cash.
And then I get gratified.
I say, hmm, I was right.
Now it's clear and everyone will see the truth.
So that's the love part.
But the hate part is that, like, we've seen this happen so many times, we really, I think we kind of know that no one will care.
It just feels like the momentum of capitalism is so efficient at erasing history and swallowing up anything that even hints at being countercultural.
And the people, like obviously one of the people high-fiving Marcus on that feed is J.P.
Sears.
And Preston Smiles, who's there.
There's a bunch of people we've covered just being like, way to go, bro, or fists, or all this stuff.
And I'm like, you are the same people out there fat shaming all the time, and you're high-fiving someone, selling their company, making a lot of money to the company that is directly implicated in the obesity problem.
And it's just, you don't care.
You just don't care.
The jab.
Our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
There's so much going on internationally around the COVID vaccine.
Joe Rogan's fiasco temporarily took attention away from the massive humanitarian crisis in India.
Their second wave COVID numbers keep soaring and trains are rushing ever dwindling emergency supplies of oxygen to the hardest hit areas.
Along with new variants, super spreader events may be to blame, like huge political rallies held by India's Prime Minister Modi, as well as religious festivals like the enormous month-long Maha Kumela, which included 9 million pilgrims gathering to, amongst other rituals, bathe en which included 9 million pilgrims gathering to, amongst other rituals, bathe en masse in the
Sadly, nothing adds more fuel to the fire of those who don't trust the vaccines than pharmaceutical companies keeping a tight grip on the patents to those vaccines when the poorest countries in the world are desperately in need.
Predictably, the anti-vax copypasta follows the usual throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-just-see-what-sticks routine.
You know, vaccines are tyranny.
They're rushed, experimental, dangerous to women, more contagious than the actual virus.
They make people sick.
But then, look, the pharmaceutical companies are so corrupt they won't waive their vaccine patents.
Now, ideally, I think the majority of medical research, drug development, and healthcare should be taken out of the private sector and funded by governments.
You socialist!
I know.
That's not the world we live in right now.
Especially in the West.
Especially in the United States.
Within the existing system, Medicines are substantially researched, developed and manufactured in the private sector by companies that employ thousands.
And so imposing a huge loss on them after their unprecedented breakthrough work on the vaccines seems dangerous or maybe unfair.
Of course, the other side of the debate is that governments and taxpayers already provided significant funding for the COVID vaccines.
So how exactly we sustainably balance that profit and loss statement is certainly beyond me.
And I don't think anyone benefits from oversimplifying it.
Some are saying that if the vaccine recipes become freely available, that there's also the issue of quality control and safety as companies without sufficient resources or experience begin whipping up their own batches as fast as they can.
One solution might be governments, philanthropists, and NGOs compensating pharmaceutical companies for manufacturing and delivering massive amounts of vaccines to India, Brazil, Argentina, and elsewhere at heavily reduced bulk prices.
However, the good news, the Biden administration did say yesterday at the World Trade Organization that they supported an easing of patent rules.
So let's see what can be negotiated in the coming days.
In the meantime though, along with the QAnon inspired violence we've covered since the inception of this podcast, 5G tower vandalism and anti-Asian hate crimes, I'm wondering now if we need to worry about Anti-vax terrorism emerging, as it often has with other extremist or cultish beliefs.
On Monday, case in point, two men were arrested in the northern Italian town of Brescia for firebombing a vaccine distribution hub.
Their attack did lead to a fire, but thankfully it was contained before it spread to the area where the vaccines are stored.
One of the men posted to Facebook, of course, as you do, just before the attack, that if we want to destroy the enemy, we must use the same weapon, fear.
And their fear is our unity.
There are no other solutions.
I was so happy to hear Biden come out and make good on another campaign promise.
Just by easing those laws, if anyone's interested, last night, so Wednesday night, Maddow did a great piece on what happened after the anthrax attacks post 9-11 that were happening in the U.S. and how the Bush administration threatened Maddow did a great piece on what happened after the anthrax attacks post 9-11 that were happening in the U.S. and how the Bush administration threatened to ease
They said it was going to take them something like 20 months to create enough supply that the U.S. was requesting.
They said, okay, we're going to make it generic then.
Bayer said, oh, we can do it in four weeks.
It was a great example of why, and I agree with you, that healthcare should be controlled by the government taking taxpayer money and putting it into there.
But I also want to point out a little bit of complexity in this because there is always such a, as I mentioned in the Ana piece, like natural versus pharmaceutical idea.
Pharmaceutical companies Pay a lot of money in R&D and a lot of stuff they try to patent doesn't go through.
They really do rely on Viagra, like blockbuster drugs.
Now again, I have no love for what they've done with the opioid crisis or the antidepressant crisis.
There are a lot of problems.
But it's not as simple as pharma bad organic good.
And that money does need to be recouped.
And so setting up a system where since the taxpayers are putting a lot of the money into the R&D for something like a vaccine, opening up the patent laws, and then helping People in other countries get access to the vaccines so that the entire global trade economy can open up is a win for everyone from a public health standpoint and a business standpoint.
And the short-sightedness of the anti-vaxxers beyond everything else, beyond their bunk science, beyond their downlines, beyond their propaganda, it's the short-sightedness that time and again is really frustrating.
So for this episode, we wanted to turn the bulk of our attention and a kind of paralyzed love towards India where the COVID crisis only seems to deepen.
and I guess not entirely paralyzed because our interview guest today, Sheena Sood, she's a sociologist who studies decolonization and she has family in India.
She's provided a highly informed list of on-the-ground aid organizations that you can give money to.
As well as, I think this is really important, independent news outlets and writers that are doing their best to break through Modi's nationalist pageantry and message control.
She's also pointed us towards a treasure trove of the writings of the Dalit Buddhist reformer Ambedkar, who I think passed away in 1956.
And I think if more people had listened to him back then, India might be in a very different position today.
Anyway, all of that stuff is in the show notes.
For me, the key image that has been haunting me is one that I think Pretty much everybody around the world has seen, which is the drone footage of the improvised cremation pyres in parking lots and public parks of major Indian cities.
And what stands out is not only the devastation The incalculable trauma that all of those families are going through.
For me as an outsider, as somebody who has been part of the global yoga world for a long time now, it's also that these same pyres form a kind of toxic mimic of the central ritual of New Age fascination with And India that is more imaginary than real for them, centered on the fire ceremonies of Vedic culture.
I think if anything breaks the spell of New Age idealizations of India, I would imagine that these images would.
But of course, so far, COVID denialists in the Anglo world that we follow aren't saying anything about the clear catastrophe lighting up India.
But conspirituality is kind of like that.
It's an indulgence of a dream world.
Now I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that India is a kind of motherland for the themes of this podcast and how they emerge from a tortured history of modernization, disenchantment, scientific development plus scientific resistance, and the commodification of spirituality against the backdrop of racial and colonial inequalities.
If we track the ideological, sentimental, and poetic roots of our key influencers back far enough, they just wind their way back through the influx of Orientalist spiritual consumerism of the late 1960s, which is when Indian yoga evangelists started making bank in Europe and North America.
And before that, we see it in the American romance with Shangri-La that emerged in the 1930s and all of its fascist undertones.
And before that, there's the weird story of theosophist Charles Leadbeater creeping on the 14-year-old Jiddu Krishnamurti on the beach in Chennai back in 1909 and deciding that the boy was supposed to be the world's teacher.
I suppose that boy, instead of The other boys who were, you know, taking care of his food and sweeping out his hotel room.
Now back further, we have new thought in the 19th century with its connections to the reveries of transcendentalists like Thoreau, who wrote, based upon his naive and nerdy immersion in early translations of the Bhagavad Gita, he said, depend on it that rude and careless as I am, I would feign practice the yoga faithfully.
To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogin.
Now, as religious studies scholar Richard Davis writes, Thoreau drew on Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of one mind as a hermeneutical principle.
Thoreau sought to overcome temporal and spatial distance in his reading and to integrate ideas and practices of these Hindu texts from ancient India selectively within his own life.
Listening to the voices of Indic sages reinforced Thoreau's own inclinations toward austerity and equanimity.
They gave him a foundation for his life experiments in voluntary simplification and yogic contemplation at Walden Pond.
In other words, India for Thoreau provided a kind of spiritual inspiration.
But of course he never traveled there.
And if he had, his journey might have looked like my own travels there, as a young, impressionable person with a credit card, disillusioned with my birth culture and religion, and desperately wanting to believe that somehow India was a pure land, untouched by modernity, untouched by my own culture, which had made its inroads into India's history and economy.
And if Thoreau was lucky, he, like I, might have had this spell broken by a reality check.
I was there to see temples, to visit Tibetan monasteries in exile.
I was there to be served a communal meal on palm leaf plates in a gurdwara.
I was there on a psychological shopping trip that I framed as a pilgrimage.
But this thing kept happening, usually while traveling.
On one long, slow train between Delhi and Chandigarh, I sat in an open door as we passed by at least 50 miles of shantytown where one could see the open-pit toilets and the single water pumps for a dozen families.
And I couldn't look at this landscape and see anything sacred or special or life-giving or protective about this land, or at least Things that would be protective against the basic sins of neglect and inequality because there was this New Age Indophile propaganda that I had absorbed and I felt it evaporating.
The Indian people were not homogenous, not monolithic, they did not carry with them some ultimately protective philosophy that was eternal and that would allow them to transcend circumstance.
That was the buzz around spiritual tourism.
That's what the booking agents sold you in the New Age world.
That India is real, raw.
The simple people are in touch with the basics.
They have little, but they know how to be happy, unlike us.
So New Age tourism did a shitload of work to rationalize wealth and privilege while maintaining this kind of faux humility for which they could then compensate for by shopping.
And around that same time, I also recognize that this New Age attitude actually does some of the emotional work of Empire.
Because when you rationalize poverty as a spiritual opportunity, what you're saying is that the material stuff of life doesn't matter.
To those people you think you are praising or idealizing.
But what this feigned idealization conceals is actually a form of racially motivated contempt.
It reminds me of General Westmoreland who butchered his way to disaster in Vietnam and he made the quiet part out loud.
He said, the Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner.
Life is plentiful.
Life is cheap in the Orient.
So, 20 years after my trips to India, I came across the most concrete data for why Oriental life, whatever that meant, was plentiful and cheap to the imperialist eye.
Westmoreland trained himself to rationalize piling up corpses, but he comes from a long tradition of theft and plunder.
I knew that colonial economy was theft, I didn't know the extent.
Veteran Indian economist Utsa Patnaik made it clear with an exhaustive study of the ledgers of the East India Company that showed that between 1765 and 1938, the Brits sucked $45 trillion worth of material wealth out of India.
Not just by buying low and selling high, but through outright fraud.
As Jason Hickel reports, reviewing Pitnayat's work.
The East India Company began collecting taxes in India and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues, about a third, to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use.
In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, buying from peasants and weavers using money that they had just taken from them.
It was a scam, theft on a grand scale, yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods.
Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.
Some of those stolen goods were consumed in Britain and the rest were re-exported elsewhere.
The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar, and timber, which were essential to Britain's industrialization.
Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systemic theft from India.
So where it gets super complicated is that while New Age and Orientalist views of India really want to reconstruct a pure land and paper this entire history over, while also benefiting from the economic inequalities of capitalism and inequality, So, too, did many Indian nationalists who were mainly uppercased, and they still do to this day.
And that's why prominent skeptical critic Meera Nanda tagged the nationalists during their current surge in power as, quote, profits facing backwards, unquote, in her study of how Hindu nationalism And its nostalgia, its pride, its xenophobia frames public policy, including, and crucially for what we see happening now, in the sciences.
Nanda captures and analyzes statements from officials of the BJP, Modi's party, that highlight a religious exceptionalism that must take all credit for all things,
And this can lead to absurd claims such as the ancient epic literature like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana contain evidence for a technologically advanced ancient Sanskrit civilization that had flying cars and nuclear weapons and where the population was inseparable from the divine pantheon.
Now, in a trickle-down, fairly benign way, we see a similar process at play in the work of the global Ayurveda evangelist, Vasant Lad.
He has an institute called the Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque.
In several of his books, for instance, he claims that the ancient Ayurvedic list of the sensual qualities of food and substances, there happen to be 20 of them, actually referred to the 20 amino acids.
But Miranda's main point is that the Hindutva, like all fascists, point back to an invented past in order to justify their claims of purity, authority, the way things should be, the way things must be, the way bodies must be.
So here's Nanda.
The Hindutva literature is replete with glowing tributes to Hindu Renaissance, which they claim to be similar to the European Renaissance that ushered in the modern age in the West.
What they forget is that the Renaissance in the West rediscovered the humanistic and naturalistic sources of the Greek tradition that had been overshadowed by the Catholic Church.
The Renaissance humanists rediscovered this worldly philosophy of Aristotle and critical realist Socrates over the otherworldly philosophy of Plato.
The Neo-Hindu Renaissance, in contrast, rediscovered the most mystical and anti-humanistic elements of the Vedic inheritance, Advaita Vedanta, that had always overshadowed and silenced the naturalistic and scientific traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Neo-Hinduism is no renaissance.
It's a revival.
There is no denying that the Neo-Hindu discovery of modern science in the ancient teachings of the Vedas and Upanishads has limited usefulness.
Since they had convinced themselves that their religion was the mother of all sciences, conservative Hindus did not feel threatened by scientific education.
As long as science could be treated as just another name for Vedic truths, they were even enthusiastic to learn it.
So that's from Prophets Facing Backward, Postmodern Critiques of Science and the Hindu Nationalism in India.
That's from 2003.
Now, Nanda was also razor sharp in pointing out that the Hindutva process of saffronization, which Sheena Sood will define for us in the interview, also feeds on the external validation of global spiritual consumers.
In one stinging remark, she sums it all up.
The more prominence Hinduism gets abroad, even for wrong reasons like the New Age and paganism, the more prestige it gains in India.
Now in my interview with Sud, we'll outline this tangled history and she'll give a concise rundown of how Moody came to power and how his ideology is destroying his country's chance at a reasonable COVID recovery and why global yoga folks aren't helping when they get fooled by the yoga washing.
So, what is the Indian COVID crisis through the lens of fundamentalism and conspirituality?
Sheena will tell us about BJP ministers advocating for Ayurveda, Modi pushing his yoga videos, and how he let the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar proceed with millions of visitors, as Julian remarked upon, because evidently religion is more real than the virus.
The example I'll bring up here is from the winter and it shows how white spiritual tourists further this same absurd view.
I posted this story to Instagram a while back that the 3HO kundalini yoga leader Gurmukh had shared on Instagram an unsourced video montage of the massive farming protests that had been going on outside of Delhi and Mumbai that were, I think they dated back to November.
Now, if you want to know more about Gurmukh, you can check out our episodes 36 and 37 on the cult of Yogi Bhajan.
Gurmukh was one of his senior students.
Now, the farmers, many of whom were Punjabi Sikhs, were protesting the Hindu nationalists' deregulation of agriculture because what Modi had done in September was to force through laws that favored corporate agribusiness and Critics said would push the 80% of small-scale farmers that make up the Indian agricultural landscape closer to bankruptcy.
So, Gormukh's video doesn't care about this life-and-death battle over food production, because the video's intent is to prove that COVID doesn't exist.
So how does it do this?
It showed protesters camped outside the cities with tents and outdoor kitchens, standing close together to chant and protest the undemocratic changes.
Their peaceful march into the cities was blocked by paramilitaries with tear gas, with water cannon, and concertina wire.
But the video points out that few, if any, of the protesters are wearing masks.
And when they prepare food, they're not using gloves, they're not using hand sanitizer, there's no mention made about whether any PPE is available to them.
And then the video asks, where's COVID?
As if the lack of PPE proves that COVID is absent.
But then, more astonishingly, it asks the viewers to simply believe that no one is contracting the virus in such close and dangerous quarters.
And then you do a quick search and it reveals that actual news sources from the time quoted Indian officials expressing worry about the danger of the protests.
India Today, in fact, reported that infection rates were surging in the camps at the time and public health officials were struggling to deploy tests and masks.
But the real kicker was that Gurumukh's video ended with the platitude that farmers are teaching us a life lesson.
Ostensibly about dispelling fear of a fictional virus.
And so we have this gross parasitization of a dangerous political conflict that fits right in with this kind of neo-colonial project of using India as the movie set and Indians as the props for the marketing of modern global yoga and its faux appeals to naturalness and simplicity.
And we should note here that Gurmukh leads several trips to India every year, like yoga, spiritual vacation trips.
The Post also feigns solidarity with working-class Indians.
You know, which is a real ploy affected by wealthy spiritual tourists that have roamed India for a hundred or more years.
You know, you identify with the poor, you gain bohemian cred, you obscure your wealth, you assuage your guilt, and then you return as importers of exotica.
But the truth is their presence in India has been made possible first by neocolonial imbalances and privileges.
And it's now facilitated by the kind of deregulation that's being pushed by the BJP, the same policies that the farmers are protesting.
So the post minimizes COVID.
It cynically co-ops Indian politics and people to complain about public health measures that restrict like a yoga, yogapreneur's freedom to do spiritual tourism.
and whatever she was going to do, practice Breath of Fire without masks.
It objectifies the Indian working class to sell an Orientalist spiritualization of precarity and strife, which the influencer never has to truly participate or invest in.
So, that's that story.
Lastly, if it's not enough that white influencers are cynically distorting COVID, we've also got wealthy westernized Indian wellness and spiritual gurus already putting themselves above the crisis as prophets or whatever.
So here's Deepak Chopra with Jaggi Vasudev having a chuckle over Zoom.
Vasudev is the swaddled and Santa Claus bearded high rolling Globetrotting, like expensive car driving guru of banality known as Sadguru.
He's also, in the words of one Indian journalist, quote, Hindutva nationalism's in-house mystic and cultural icon, unquote.
He has taken anti-Islamic stances and he makes pseudoscientific claims about food and, you know, the memory of water and the health benefits of mercury and the ashes from ritual fires.
And I don't know what Chopra's politics are, but I mean, you are the company you keep.
Neither of them sound like Hindutva firebrands.
They're more like pseudoscience PR for global consumers of Indian wisdom.
And the lesson here for me is that neoliberalism can do a great job of laundering the sadism of fundamentalists.
So the clip is from a video called Sadguru and Deepak Chopra predict the future after vaccine.
And of course they do it without a shred of vaccine science to their names.
In it, they have this light banter, they're sitting in their multi-million dollar homes, they're talking about how overblown the crisis is, how nobody would have noticed COVID in the past, and when they're wrapping up, Chopra drops his alternative health salvation truth bombs, minimizing vaccine deployment, And then Sadhguru outright lies about infection rates.
His appeal to the villages, the common folk, as being invulnerable, disease-free, this is right out of the fascist playbook.
The death and morbidity, and we have published on this, I'm happy to send you papers, The mortality and morbidity of this virus is directly linked to stress, panic, sympathetic overdrive, and agitated minds.
And that's why we need more than just a simple, simplistic vaccine solution.
Because if we have a vaccine, A year from now, there'll be another mutation.
The vaccine doesn't do anything.
It doesn't look at the problem.
Very clearly demonstrated in India that of all the cases we have, over sixty percent of the cases and over eighty percent of the deaths are only in five cities.
In the villages where we are here, not a single case in all these villages around us, but only in Chennai, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and one more city, what?
Lucknow.
Bangalore not much, Bangalore they've controlled well because of door-to-door management.
I think it's obvious now with this that, you know, ecology is the main issue of our times.
The air is our breath.
The oceans and waters and the rivers are our circulation.
The earth is recycling as our body.
Even the atoms in the body were forged in the crucible of stars.
You know, you have a personal body, you have an extended body, they're both yours.
The planet is your body.
It's recycling as the ecology and the genetic information and the micro-diversity of these organisms.
And we're not looking at that.
We're looking only at vaccines.
So that's enough of that.
What about the superposition of the electron?
He left that out somehow.
He did, he did.
I don't think he had his quote generator turned on.
I thought you were going to share a clip from Sadhguru's talk with Aubrey Marcus from last year.
No, did he?
Did they?
Oh no.
Oh wow, okay.
There's so much to do.
There's so much to cover.
It's like a big fire hose.
Well, it's all happening in multiple universes, so don't beat yourself up.
Right.
We just did the side guru, Aubrey Marcus clip in another universe, so no worries.
Right.
Well, let's get to Sheena Sood.
I was very happy to be able to talk to her on short notice.
She actually knows what she's talking about, and she'll shed light on how boulderized versions of Indian spirituality can act as a fig leaf for people who only pretend to care about the poor and the marginalized.
Thank you, Sheena, for taking time to stop by Conspirituality Podcast.
Thanks for having me, Matthew.
Grateful to be here.
I wanted to just briefly open by inviting you to introduce yourself and your work, first of all.
For everyone who's listening, my name is Sheena Sood.
I am a yoga teacher and healing justice practitioner who's of Desi, or what people call of the South Asian diaspora, descent.
And I was born and raised in the U.S.
south, particularly in North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia area.
I currently live in Philadelphia, or what is also known as unceded territories first inhabited and cared for by the Lanai Lenape people.
So as a daughter of immigrants from India and parts of present-day Pakistan, I I wasn't necessarily taught to question the narrative of settler colonialism, but that's something that I've grown to question and criticize through my involvement in social movements.
Locally, in Philadelphia, for instance, the campaigns to bring Mumia Abu-Jamal home, who's a longtime political prisoner, campaigns for the MOVE organization, And in solidarity with indigenous and oppressed peoples around the globe.
Also, my approach to teaching and practicing yoga is through this critical lens of merging frameworks of decolonization with liberation theology politics to advance social justice movements or to give people involved in those movements the fuel to be able to heal themselves in the face of structural and state violence.
Some of the projects I'm working on now, for instance, is a kids yoga program, Yoga Warrior Tales, that teaches social justice through using yoga.
And then finally, I'm a sociology PhD who got my PhD from Temple University, and I'm an activist scholar who teaches and writes on the intersection of critical ethnic studies, critical yoga studies, and social movements.
And I understand that you still have family in India, and I understand also that your great-uncle is ill, and I just wanted to flag that and ask how he's doing.
Yeah, this is my dad's side.
So it's his, uh, the last remaining sibling of his mom's generation of siblings.
And this is my Ram Singh mamaji.
We found out last week that he has COVID.
And while he's lived a very healthy life, it's just been such a tragic way of finding out that, you know, along with the really disastrous and tragic An apocalyptic reality that India is facing that, you know, I know I don't know of a person in the South Asian diaspora amongst my friends who doesn't have family who's impacted right now.
He is luckily one of the few who has access to oxygen cylinders in his home.
And who's able to have access to something that's currently on the black market and in extreme scarcity.
And I can't help but think about the people who don't have family in the Western world, who are most likely in rural areas who don't even know if they have COVID because of lack of access to testing.
And so, yeah, it's, um, You know, it's not necessarily looking good for him.
I'm still keeping my prayers up.
But my heart just goes out to the entire country and to the people who are of the civil society who are just trying to take care of each other in these times.
Well, to explore and understand that very complicated landscape, and I really do, I join with you in hoping that he recovers.
For our listeners, if we could do like a really quick lightning round on some basic terms, I think that would be helpful for situating the conversation.
So, these would be key terms and concepts that impact this landscape or inform this landscape that we're talking about.
So, just briefly, yeah, okay, briefly.
So, the first term is Hindutva.
Yeah, so, Hindutva, it depends who you might ask, right, if they're going to be of the critical mind or not, but it's known as the right-wing political ideology of Hindu nationalism.
And it informs the practices and policies of the current ruling political party, the BJP or the Bharata Janata Party.
Some Hindus might say that, you know, Hindutva is not political, that it's just synonymous with this essence of India, which is Hinduness.
Now, part of Hindutva policy has been called a very interesting term, which is Saffronization.
What does that imply?
Yeah, so saffron is, it refers to the herb or the medicine, right?
Or sorry, just like the spice of saffron that's used in a lot of culinary dishes, it also refers to the color that signifies and symbolizes Hindutva.
So saffronization itself is the attempt to teach about the history of India In this way that prioritizes Hinduism and this notion that India has always been a Hindu state and that anyone who's non-Hindu is a foreign invader.
Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs, you know, kind of any non-Hindu minority groups are kind of considered invaders or foreigners and they are marginalized by this Safranization practice.
And Safranization, just to be more specific, would impact education, the way in which history is taught, and perspectives on how civil ethics should be organized, and also what reality is, really, according to theological frameworks.
Exactly, in ways that legitimize, you know, ancient myths of India and Hinduism, in ways that basically teach about yoga, you know, and spirituality as this, you know, monolithic Hindu practice, which is not evidence-based, right?
Right.
Okay, next one is Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
So Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or the RSS is basically the apex of the family of Hindu organizations that was founded in 1925 and it's a paramilitary organization of militant Hindus who want to instate a pure Hindu society.
When you say it's paramilitary, do they do exercises?
Is it like summer camps?
I can't really visualize an armed Indian paramilitary, but it sounds like that's part of it.
Yeah, they subscribe to this notion for a long time of somatic nationalism, so doing yoga, armed kind of military training, all in the name of saying, you know, we're protecting Hindu identity and we're training a disciplined cadre of people to join and be a part of this organization.
They also have, because you know I mentioned they were founded in 1925, so they have an almost hundred year existence and basically one of their leaders back when India gained independence was responsible for the murder of
Mahatma Gandhi after India gained its independence and it kind of went quiet for a little bit but then it re-emerged and they have always had an entrenched kind of connection to rural India and even built up that entrenched membership across India over the course of So really strong organizational capacities and big networks that maybe bridge the urban and rural divides.
Absolutely, yeah.
And some are more active than others.
There's a lot of passive membership as well, but generally speaking, a lot of their members kind of do subscribe to these myths that get propagated through the Hindu origins myth as it relates to India.
Okay, so switching gears, on the other side of the spectrum, tell us a little bit about the Congress Party.
Yeah, so the Congress Party for a long time was the leading, well, it was the leading party that was founded out of India's independence from British colonialism.
And they were founded through Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi were some of its founding leaders.
They basically led India out of independence.
And, you know, instilled a lot of development programs to advance India coming out of British colonialism.
They've had basically a family dynasty of leaders with Nehru, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and Samjiv Gandhi were some of the leaders of the Congress Party over time.
And when we started seeing the rise of the BJP party, A lot of that was largely because as the Congress Party kind of, once that development came to a stagnation in the 70s and 80s, the BJP was able to kind of take advantage of the frustrations amongst the Indian masses and build up their membership and their cadre.
And now what we're witnessing is in some ways the Congress Party's decline.
Okay, yoga as soft power.
I think for me, the ability to use yoga to spread like a cultural nationalist ideology.
So when we were saying when I was saying earlier that, you know, there's this rewriting of
Indian history through the Safranization, what we're also seeing with using yoga as soft power is kind of spreading this mindset across the globe, not just in India, that, you know, perpetuates the idea that yoga is innocent, that yoga spreads peace, that yoga is harmless.
And what comes to mind when I think of an example of yoga and soft power is when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was first elected in 2014, he went straight to the United Nations Never mind that he was formally banned from coming to the U.S.
We'll get to there later, but he went and basically proposed a resolution that said, I want to pass an international yoga day, and I want to give basically credit to ancient India for giving us this spiritual practice that brings us peace, that brings the world peace, that can fight climate change,
And, uh, you know, that's one example of how he's able to kind of propagate this idea that yoga promotes tolerance.
Yoga promotes civilization.
Uh, but it disguises this kind of decolonial movement or it's disguised as a decolonial movement.
But in fact, uh, it should be viewed as very skeptical, uh, because it bolsters like And outside of India proper, within the Desi community, there are a number of organizations like this, but I'll just ask you to lightening round one of them, the Hindu American Foundation.
What do they do?
So the Hindu American Foundation seeks to lift up the marginalization of Hindus across the globe.
And, you know, as a mission statement kind of definition, advocate for the dignity and human rights of Hindus.
But I think they, similar to a lot of organizations that are part of that family of Hindu right organizations, participate in the rewriting of Indian history in this like far-fetched way.
We've seen it with their take back the roots of yoga kind of campaign.
We've seen it with their California textbook campaign where they try to erase the marginalization of lower caste uh, groups from textbooks.
So as to make sure like Hindu gets portrayed, Hinduism gets portrayed as pure, um, pure, pure, pure and egalitarian and, um, and pro-social and forward-looking and, and also, and also scientifically minded too.
That's part of the, uh, That's part of the story, right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, exactly.
Like, civilized.
Yeah, you know, we're not proselytizing is something that I was often told when I was younger.
Like, Hindus don't proselytize.
They don't convert anyone as a way to then Kind of separate Hinduism from these other religions that are invaders, right?
My hands are up for quotes!
Right.
Like Islam and Christianity, which, you know, invaded and basically, when it comes to India, are unnatural, right?
The question of the invading religion is interesting in light of yoga as soft power and Modi taking his trip to the United Nations because there is a kind of proselytization that is disguised in the language of we are offering this gift to the world.
Yeah, that's a really good allusion because I think there's a way in which
Hinduism likes to claim that it's not trying to spread its tentacles of Hindu right ideology or far-right ideology across the globe, but then by, you know, using yoga in this way, I think they are definitely propagating this kind of ideology of
The average yoga person who I encounter doesn't necessarily question International Yoga Day or the practice of it.
They don't necessarily question this narrative of yoga as Hindu or yoga as
India as an ancient Hindu nation and so the soft power works because most people who practice yoga are not critically engaging with texts or studies or social science in a way that is basically looking critically at how perhaps it's more indigenous people from a variety of belief systems and ideologies who curated, you know, what we now know as variations of yoga.
But it gets presented as this very monolithic practice with a straightforward lineage as opposed to a practice that is much more diverse.
You know, the monolithic nature of the presentation and the homogeneity of what we see coming out of India during International Yoga Day always strikes me because, you know, often North American yoga people will post on social media about how wonderful it was that
You know, that 40,000 people gathered on the main boulevard in Delhi with Modi up at the front doing their 20-minute yoga routine on International Yoga Day, and everybody's wearing the same t-shirts, and everybody is of a certain age, and you don't see, there are no sadhus there.
there.
It doesn't look like anybody is infirm or ill.
And this brings me to the last little bullet point, which is, can you tell us a little bit about Hindutva's historical fascination with Nazism and more recently Trumpism?
Well, first of all, I think Modi is a creator of spectacles, right?
Creator of spectacles of Basically, uniformity and monolithic identity in this case.
I think he's also a creator of spectacles of like when we think about alliances and, you know, the Trump-Modi alliance and some of the basically large scale gatherings that happened both in India, in Ahmedabad in February of 2020.
And then the I can't remember the name of the Modi rally that happened in Texas a few years back.
But, you know, hundreds of thousands of people attended these rallies, right?
And we see a basically strong alignment between the politics of extremism, as we see as it relates to Trump emboldening white nationalists, and Modi has for the past couple decades actively emboldened Hindu extremists.
A lot of even the emboldening of Hindu extremists comes from the RSS, which Modi joined when he was eight years old, right?
So the RSS had a long adoration for basically Mussolini's fascism, for Nazism as it came up because there was like a
strong common cause in anti-semitist ideologies and there was like an appeal to the RSS to see it as a useful model for demonizing Muslims and continuing to see Muslims as invaders.
And then they also looked to the Nazism and The model of kind of developing their cadre through that kind of somatic nationalism, right?
We're resisting the colonization from the British and the feminization on the Indian body, right?
So the masculine body feeling um less powerful and uh repressed by the white colonizer and so we're going to use yoga we're going to use these paramilitary techniques to basically build our body and propagate nationalist ideologies to find discipline
It's such a fascinating turnabout and mirroring and it's very, there's such a tragic note to it that like the organized sort of response to colonialism took on this kind of parallel quality that That the tools that these early modernizers and anti-colonialists had to draw on were the tools of empire in a way.
In their pedagogy, in their social organizations, in their physical training.
I'm wondering, do you ever wonder, we're going away from lightning round here, but do you ever wonder if it could have gone a different way?
If there could have been a different sort of somatics or ethics to anti-colonialism.
I do!
And I can't say that I've read much of B.R.
Ambedkar, but I know that Dalit movements for a really long time You know, and B.R.
Ambedkar basically thought that because the caste system within India, which, you know, is like a social, basically religious system that divides people into groups based on birth and it's, you know, a fixed system that, you know, positions people in oppressive categories and hierarchies.
He said that because there's no way out of This Brahmanical system of oppression that he converted to Buddhism, right?
And then Dalits kind of continuously lift up the inherent kind of oppressive elements of Hinduism.
And I think there's, you know, my wondering is like, you know, the merging of Naxalite movements and Marxist movements within the South Asian region with this basically abolitionist position around casteism and some of the hierarchies of that to basically create a more egalitarian society in practice, not just in rhetoric.
So that's where my kind of imaginations or dreams goes towards like an abolitionist future.
It would have required so much more radical and fast reorganization from what I know of the 1920s and 30s because the modern yoga movement history that I'm familiar with
was deeply enmeshed in the disciplinarian sort of structures of cased politics and, you know, Patabi Joyce emerges from the Mysore Palace saying that of course he would never teach Muslims and, you know, there's clear distinctions between who can and can't practice and who can be a performer and who's able to be a teacher.
And so it's almost as if the physical culture, all of these tools of anti-colonial resistance that emerged and became very popular really relied on the hierarchical structure that Ambedkar is actually criticizing from the ground up.
Absolutely, yeah.
And, you know, when we think about Third World countries emerging out of independence and you know, there was the non-aligned movement for a little bit which was the connecting of countries who had been formerly colonized in the Arab world and South Asia.
and other parts of the world, you know, to resist imperialism.
There were those for a while, but, you know, the pressures of empire from the U.S. and Europe did have a strong way of imposing economic and development policies on, you know, India, and therefore the pressures of empire from the U.S.
and Europe did have a strong way of imposing economic and development policies on, you know, India, and therefore the cultural practices and therefore the cultural practices like yoga, therefore also were kind of to appease the colonists, you know, that element of internal colonization or internalized colonialism does apply here You know, that element of internal colonization or internalized colonialism does apply here in thinking about how there was still an element of, yeah, we're resisting British colonialism,
but that doesn't mean we're not obsessed with trying to impress but that doesn't mean we're not obsessed with trying to impress and be like the white And so we're going to adopt these practices from, you know, Swedish gymnasts and whatnot. - Yeah.
Well, moving to the present crisis in India, I suppose a little bit of groundwork for the forces that drove Modi to power.
You've referred to them briefly, but if you could pick out three main sort of drivers of his popularity, at least up until this point, because it seems to be in danger at this point, what would those three forces be?
I'd say first, you know, I briefly mentioned that he came up through the ranks of the RSS as a young person.
And has routinely endorsed anti-Muslim violence.
The most famous instance of which is when he was chief minister or what we would call governor in America of the state of Gujarat.
And so in 2002, there was this pogrom called the Gujarat pogrom, which lasted for a series of months, two or three months.
That happened in response to the burning of a coach train with Hindu pilgrims in it, who were returning from this site where a mosque was burned, not burned, hammered to the ground 10 years prior by Hindu pilgrims.
And these pilgrims were returning on a train, basically coming back from a campaign or a rally to support building a Hindu temple there to honor the deity Ram.
Right.
And so when they returned, basically Modi and other leaders kind of paraded these caskets of the Hindu bodies across the city, basically fueling and stoking the fire of Hindus to feel enraged.
And Modi stood aside and did not, basically sanctioned the violence of what then followed, which were the Gujarat pogroms, where Hindu vigilante mobs were Burning and setting on fire, you know, kids, children, women cutting out their stomachs if they were impregnated and like murdering people.
Over 2,000 Muslims were murdered during this massacre known as the Gujarat riots.
You know, he was kind of initially somewhat reprimanded by the higher leadership of the BJP, but the RSS and the Gujarati people, basically this emboldened them more and he became more popular amongst the Gujarat and the RSS.
And so this kind of propelled him to run for prime minister, right?
So basically through an agenda of division, he was able to propel himself A leadership position in the BJP, that's one aspect, right?
Or one thing that kind of drove him to power.
I think another thing, in my opinion, is his ability to control the narrative.
Whether that's through kind of his, he has a firm grasp on the media in India, where even when it came to the beginning of COVID, he Finally had his first press conference, but he encouraged journalists and writers to only post positive stories, right?
And that's what we're also seeing now is he's kind of creating a spectacle of what's going on.
In the nation, when in fact on the ground people are desperately looking for care, he's basically intimidating journalists and controlling the narrative through his relationship with social media and mainstream media and the news to basically not necessarily share what's actually going on in the ground.
And that's something I think, you know, I mentioned he's a lover of spectacles.
And I think that is through his ability to control the narrative and portray himself as even this kind of peaceful person and portray Hindus as the victims of, you know, when we think about India and its secular state.
When we think about India and its secular state.
And just back to and back to yoga for a moment before you get to your third point.
And just back to and back to yoga for a moment before you get to your third point, does he actually I mean, I know about the suppression of Twitter reports and he's got Facebook.
Does he actually I mean, I know about the suppression of Twitter reports and he's got Facebook.
I think he's he's been able to strong arm Facebook into having criticisms of oxygen supply closed down and stuff like that.
But when he gives press conferences, does he actually actively say to the media, you really should.
Print positive stories.
And is there sort of a is there almost a religious or a spiritual rationalization behind that?
You know, that's a really good question. - I'm gonna go ahead and get a little bit.
From what I know, I don't recall if he's had more than one press conference.
The first one that he had was March 2020, last year.
And I think I wrote a little bit about it in one of the pieces that I wrote on Spectacles of Compassion and Modi's Weaponization of Yoga.
Right.
I would imagine that those two do have something to do with each other, right?
Because it's like, oh, if we, you know, Right when Corona became a, when the first lockdowns happened, and the strictest lockdown happened in India where he gave people four hours notice last year in March 2020, and he had this nine minutes light your candles Basically to, like, pray corona away.
Let's bang our pots, everyone.
Come out on your porches and your rooftops and let's bang pots to, like, make corona go away.
Which, you know, y'all talk about pseudoscience a lot on this podcast, but, you know, it's this idea that positivity and prayer is going to make, you know, this deadly virus go away.
And I suppose at that moment where he gives people four hours to get to their residences, which stranded millions of people, especially migrant workers, and some of them were on the road for months, of course, infecting each other with COVID, it was a complete disaster.
I didn't realize that that was like completely slammed up against him sort of offering these ritual solutions to the population as well.
I mean, that's a pretty stark kind of example of, okay, so here's my draconian policy, but let's be really pious about things too.
And let's do yoga too.
Right.
He was like, with these videos, I have them online.
And he promoted his own videos.
Yes.
Oh man.
That's incredible.
Wow.
So it's right out in the open, right?
Yeah.
Um, I haven't checked them out, but I think he promoted them on his, one of his weekly radio shows called monkey bot.
Uh, Somebody was like, how do you handle the stress of this moment?
And he was like, well, I do my daily yoga practice.
You can check them out.
They're in multiple languages.
Oh, wow.
Do you think that that was multiple Indian languages?
Or was that prefabricated for national dispersal?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I haven't checked them out, but that's worth looking into.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's both in Indian languages or in others as well, other popular.
Okay, so we've got, he basically rides a wave of bloodshed in Gujarat into the heart of the BJP.
He's masterfully able to control the narrative.
What's the third thing that you would say drove him to power or keeps him in power?
Yeah, so there's this article that I'm recalling, Blood and Soil in Modi's India, which was in the New Yorker maybe a year and a half ago, that remarked on this one psychologist who at one point studied members of the RSS and
Basically interviewed them and he walked away from this interview with Modi basically saying he has all of the traits of an authoritarian leader.
Puritanical rigidity, constricted emotional life, fear of his own passions.
And an enormous ego protecting his insecurities.
And I think his ability to use that authoritarian leadership, often in ways similar to Trump, to invoke passion and hatred towards minority groups, in this case non-Hindu minorities or anyone who's criticizing his government or leadership, is basically a quality that has also helped him rise to power.
He has not lost an individual election since.
He ran in 2002 after the Pogrom.
I mean, there's an incredible sort of study and contrasts in authoritarianism or at least strongmanism.
I mean, I think the Trump-Modi comparisons are weak in a lot of ways, but it's not lost on me that Modi really presents himself as some kind of modern mystic or, you know, monk in a way.
So this is somebody who left his own family or his, I don't know if he had children with his, with his, with his wife who they married at 17, 18.
Yeah.
Hearing of any children.
Right.
So, so he is ostensibly celibate.
Uh, he is, um, you know, uh, I imagine he's, I imagine he's vegetarian.
Uh, I imagine that, uh, his sort of daily ritual, his Dhinacharya is right on point.
Uh, and that's part of the, and that must be part of the administrative sort of mythology around him as well as that, is that, uh, he is embodying the, the purity of the Hindu state.
Exactly.
Exactly, and presenting himself as likable, right?
That's also part of controlling the narrative is, you know, I don't know if I've ever seen him raise his voice at a rally, right?
But if you're spewing and fueling hatred towards Muslims, but you're able to do it in this very Coherent and spiritually convincing, you know, convincing yourself as like this high spiritual leader who practices yoga, who's very calm.
If you can do it in this calm and cohesive manner, you're probably going to basically indoctrinate a lot more people to be Complicit with your ideology.
And so I think there's like a goes hand in hand with the way in which his authoritarian leadership is able to be executed through this seemingly peaceful character.
Well, there's another seemingly peaceful character that is very prominent in his circles, which is the amazing figure of Baba Ramdev, who's the most influential yoga teacher probably on the planet, and has been a Modi supporter from the outset, and I think has also contributed to you know, uh, campaign organization and door knocking and stuff like that.
But he's got, he's got a television show, a daily television yoga instruction show that reaches a hundred million people or something like that.
Um, how does, how does, um, you know, how, what's the role of somebody like, uh, Baba Ramdev in the, the BJP Imaginarium?
I first heard of Baba Ramdev when I would go visit my grandmother in India in, as early as 2003 or so.
And along with her every morning household, you know, across Punjab was like tuning into his yoga practices and saying things like, Oh, if you rub your nail here, you will grow hair, right?
Or something like that.
Just to kind of, you said, you know, over 100 million viewers, right?
I've read 25 million daily views.
I think Andrea Jayne quoted that in her book.
But just to kind of give a perspective of, I think Good Morning America gets about, you know, 5 million daily views.
It's amazing.
It's amazing.
It's fascinating.
And he has been one of the key spiritual advisors to Narendra Modi.
He's the face of this company called Patanjali Ayurved.
Which is incredible.
Incredible.
Skin whitening, skin whitening products, right?
Skin whitening products, Ayurvedic products that a year ago he claimed could cure COVID.
Has he backed off on that?
I don't recall if he's backed off.
I know he I know a lot of Criticisms were shed his way, so maybe he kind of subtly backed off.
Yeah, and I think, you know, Patanjali also, you know, as maybe some of yoga practitioners or your listeners might know, is the name of the person who kind of authored the Yoga Sutras, which, you know, I think there's also room to question how the mythology of Yoga and our understanding of Patanjali's contributions to modern-day yoga are often attributed to him.
He's the classical author of yoga texts.
It's the way in which he's able to play on the name in order to make himself the face of this company that's promoting natural alternative medicine products.
And I think he operates within this really highly competitive spiritual market, but also similar to Modi might, you know, claim an identity as a monk or claim he's not profiting from the company kind of Often uses this facade of like being anti-capitalist.
But in fact, the company itself is extremely populist, capitalistic and has such a stronghold as far as like the number of kind of branches across the state, across the state.
And so I think there's a way in which, you know, we often associate I think the West as being the only, having the only iterations of like a neoliberal version of yoga.
And when I say neoliberal, like this attempt to privatize all forms of care.
Um, and all forms of, uh, basically like social and cultural and educational institutions, um, as a solution to like any issues in the world.
But basically I think he's like one of those key neoliberal, um, kind of spiritual entrepreneurs.
Right.
And so we see how it happens even in India.
Um, and, uh, and him being the spiritual entrepreneur who's able to capitalize.
So, um, I think also sometimes he's, you know, said things like his products can cure HIV AIDS.
Uh, it can cure homosexuality.
Right.
And so we see how he's had an influence over, Some of the bills as it relates to LGBTQ issues within India and I think when he first got started in politics he basically led these like campaign corruption, or basically, like, wanted to get rid of corruption in politics, and he was pretty critical of the Congress Party.
And so his rise to power kind of coincides with Modi's rise to power.
And they've, you know, since having that kind of alliance, have been able to basically appear at rallies together.
So he functions as kind of the high priest of the Modi agenda, really, it sounds like.
Yeah, spiritual advisor.
Always wearing orange saffron robes.
Right.
Can I ask just briefly about your grandmother and the society that this television show made its way into?
Was it middle class?
Was it educated?
I mean, if he's going on TV every morning and saying, if you rub your nail on your body here, you'll grow hair, are people looking at that with a side eye a little bit?
Or does it feel fun?
How did people buy off on it?
I mean, I can speak from my experience, not having lived in India or spent more than two months at a time there.
My grandmother did not have a college education, but I would say she was middle class because so many of her Kids were able to immigrate to America and elsewhere, and she benefited from that.
And she was a big fan of, you know, just watching his television show every morning.
And I think, you know, when I recall thinking about maybe servants who I met through staying with family, I want to say that it was like a popular thing to have multiple people paying attention to Ramdev.
I wouldn't be surprised because of the massive illiteracy rate across India if
Ramdev was able to have a particular grip both on illiterate and literate populations in this way of, you know, Modi has similar kind of grips of control over whether it's like corporate CEOs or the masses of people who are less literate and we see that show up when it comes to like
The pseudoscience and the misinformation that these spiritual advisors and the government spread, that it's easy to kind of look at something online or look at something on the TV and hear that this is going to cure this, And then people just fall for it and don't question those narratives.
Well, I also wonder, you know, you brought up the comparison with the viewership for Good Morning America.
I'm wondering if the popularity of this show also kind of intersects with a way in which that same population might have been tuning in to the news or they could have been, they could have been politicized in a particular way, but they, I mean, in a way they were being politicized by a form of yoga.
I just wonder if yoga, as I believe it has in North America and Europe, has actually had a depoliticizing effect upon populations before the more political agendas can seep through, as we see with Modi.
My experience of North American yoga communities is that people They would want to watch a yoga program in the morning so that they could get away from the news.
Sure, yeah.
And I didn't hear about his campaigns against corruption until he already had a well-established popular viewership amongst the masses of Indians.
Through his television show.
So I imagine that he was able to pull people in through his anecdotal experience of being somebody who cured himself from disease through yoga, which is what I think happened with him.
And, you know, and then to be able to pull them in to, you know, connection to your body, connection to your breath and these poses as a way to, yeah, like, you know, Make it seem like I'm not teaching any politics.
And now, years later, I'm campaigning against corruption in politics.
Look at me, I'm so pure!
It's like a perfect populist pivot, isn't it?
It's like, here's wholesome stuff to do with your body, and let's get out and do sun salutations against the man.
And against corruption.
It makes a lot of sense.
I can understand the appeal.
Yeah, which is why, you know, he's got this billionaire industry through Patanjali Ayurved, but people regard him as this purist spiritual entrepreneur, not necessarily critical of his rise to power.
Now there's another yoga personality who's actually figures prominently in Modi's government and this is Yogi Adityanath.
He's in Uttar Pradesh and he's labeled as like if Baba Ramdev provides a kind of Yeah, absolutely.
of yoga power.
Yogi Adityanath is really a firebrand.
And so I'm wondering if you can say a little bit about him and about his appeal.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think yoga has a very strong hard power.
Within what I'm recalling about him as the chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh, there's both news that's very recent and historically So, within the state of Uttar Pradesh, there was a law that was passed to make yoga compulsory in public education schools, right?
So, Uttar Pradesh has a population of Muslims, many of whom, you know, see God or see Allah as their one and only God.
And a lot of them, once this law was passed, said, you know, like, if we're doing Surya Namaskars or praying to the sun, then that goes against our religion.
And I recall Yogi Adityanath saying something of the sort of like, if you think Surya Namaskars are, you know, religious or against your religious values, then you can just go jump in the sea and kill yourself, basically.
He said that out loud at a press conference or something.
Yeah, I can't remember where, but I think I read it in Andrea Jayne's more recent book on peace, love, and yoga.
You know, we see the way in which, you know, you can call it soft power or hard power to see how yoga is being made compulsory in schools, but he's definitely a BJP parliamentarian who came up through the campaign to basically dismantle the mosque that was built in Ayodhya in the 1500s.
And that campaign, I think, is what emboldened And kind of unified many members of the RSS around this divisive agenda of seeing Muslims as invaders, of seeing Hindus as the victims of, you know, a secular Indian state.
And more recently, I mentioned that he's been in the news more recently, and he's been criminalizing citizens or people in his state who are tweeting On social media about wanting access to a cylinder, an oxygen cylinder to save their grandparents life, right?
He's arresting, having people arrested and basically promoting this narrative that there is no scarcity of oxygen.
We have plenty of oxygen to serve the people.
Uh, who are needing treatment for COVID and, uh, basically having, you know, people who are losing their loved ones to this tragic disaster that the government failed to plan for are being criminalized and arrested for asking for oxygen.
Uh, I don't know how you could get more, uh, brutal and dictatorial and just, um, outright, outright cruel.
I totally agree that the cruelty of that suppression is abject.
Do you think that there's some, I mean, I totally agree that the cruelty of that suppression is abject.
It seems like it feels like there's something in there, given that it's about such an essential aspect of human life, that it's about the air that needs to be breathed in, that there's something very that it's about the air that needs to be breathed in, that there's something very shameful Um,
That there's something, like how could it possibly be true that our great nation isn't actually offering oxygen, fresh breath, fresh air to its citizens?
Of course it's here.
I mean, it's almost as if having a shortage of this type, being that acute, really exposes the vulnerability of the land itself.
Yeah, absolutely.
Which is why you're starting to see some people wake up, although I wouldn't be surprised if people would still vote for these same leaders come next election.
Um, you know, yoga is about promoting connection to breath and access to breath and, you know, sacredness of breath.
And yet we're seeing leaders who promote yoga or call themselves yogis, uh, basically, uh, profiting off of, uh, I imagine, you know, um, people dying from this virus and, I think what we're also seeing is that a year and two months ago, 14 months ago, the government had the opportunity to stockpile
Oxygen cylinders to build oxygen plants to, you know, instill them in hospitals to, you know, uh, get access to more medical supplies like hospital beds, which are running out.
Uh, and they even accepted bids for them and, and then just failed to take action.
And I think what we're also seeing is that because they prioritize looking at elections, Or, you know, spending energy on elections and promoting the image of caring for Hindus.
That in reality, you know, when we think about corrupt leaders, they're able to kind of promote the image of concern and compassion and care.
And yet in action or an embodiment of failure, Within their policies to actually enact that, you know, care is what I guess how I think about that.
I don't know.
It's just it's really It's really heartbreaking and depressing to really think about, you know, when you go on Twitter and you even just like hear the stories of people who are crying out in the streets for access to these things and the heartlessness of their leaders who are basically criminalizing them and telling them to complain.
Telling them not to complain, that refrain that was repeated in Arundhati Roy's essay from one of the chief health ministers about it's not the time to be a crybaby or something like that.
Exactly.
Exactly.
One of the really confusing things to me about how Hindutva politics navigates a situation like this is that, on one hand, India has this incredible pro-science and liberal-democratic set of achievements behind it.
in terms of its Republican days.
You know, India has been known around the world as a vaccine powerhouse.
How, I mean, how does Modi and his government and this whole mindset situate these, you know, liberal scientific achievements as being part of Indian heritage? liberal scientific achievements as being part of Indian heritage?
Well, I think we can't look at a question like that without thinking about, you know, these drug manufacturing companies have connection to pharmaceutical companies and corporations that are of the West as well.
And multinational corporations, uh, you know, can have a way of, you know, making the government profitable, not necessarily the people, uh, empowered economically.
And so, yeah, you know, I think it's really amazing in certain ways to think about how India has been able to become a vaccine powerhouse.
It's a shame that because of the patent laws of vaccine apartheid that other countries can't have licenses to also produce vaccines at equivalent rates, near equivalent rates, because, you know, then the onus becomes On India to then, you know, spread these vaccines.
And I think that the Indian and BJP government, they are proud of anything scientific, this is my opinion, in whatever way it advances their public global appeal.
So we started to see in January and February, I had a friend in Jamaica, Tell me, you know, Modi is sending vaccines to Jamaica, Modi is sending vaccines to the Caribbean and, you know, lauding basically him.
And I said to her, I said, Oh, I suspect there's something going on there.
But now what we're seeing is the privatization of those vaccines within the country itself, right?
So if you want to have access to the vaccines within India, It's incredibly expensive.
If you're thinking about a rural family who has barely has enough money or doesn't have enough money to survive, they're probably not going to spend money on this vaccine.
Oh, I had no idea.
So the vaccines are not offered by by they're not universal health covered.
No, they are not.
Uh, and I was talking to my- Like the one thing, like the one thing that you would have to have universally covered at this particular point, uh, in this crisis is not.
Yeah, exactly.
And so, so I think in the sense that, uh, it contributes to his public appeal, you know, he's able to kind of gain the reputation of taking credit for this liberal establishment, uh, of,
Being the vaccine powerhouse, but then in reality, there are numerous ways in which his leaders continue to spread a lot of misinformation about science, both through venerating ancient Indian wisdom and folk remedies from ancient India as being able to, you know, cure a range of things from cancer to HIV AIDS to COVID.
And so I think they're proud in a way, but there's also a way in which the government's kind of nostalgia for pre-modern kind of alternative medicines like Ayurveda, yoga, Unani medicine, and homeopathy kind of leans toward this pseudoscientific and biologically like implausible claimage.
We have these globalized products that like yoga, modern yoga, have been sort of crafted for export in many ways to the world, and many people find value in them, but at the same time we see
right-wing ideologues within India mobilizing these pre-modern practices to kind of cover up for their own incompetence.
So we've got ministers from the BGP and from Ayush who are pushing Ayurvedic or Vedic ritual remedies for COVID relief and telling people to take certain amounts of cow urine and so on.
So it's like they want to boost the mystical power of these healing traditions and I have this feeling that eventually that's going to discredit the traditions altogether.
I think on the one hand one of my like one One mindset that I go towards is thinking about neoliberal spirituality in the sense that when I think about what is neoliberal spirituality, it's this attempt to use ancient wisdom and ancient practices like Ayurveda or alternative medicine.
I'm not even going to say the word ancient because You know, I think that term is overplayed by members of the right, but they're putting the onus, you know, we see how when everything becomes privatized in society, the onus is placed on the individual to do these practices to take these alternative medicines as a preventive way of caring for oneself and one's body.
And what I think that does is it puts the onus on the individual that, you know, if they aren't healthy, it's their fault.
If they aren't in shape, it's their fault.
And what gets evaded is the government's responsibility for a failure to, um, Basically build an infrastructure in this case around public health and medicine.
And I think I agree with you in saying that you know these practices I think I've learned a lot from my study of Ayurveda and of yoga and I was just lucky enough to have a teacher who said you can't think about these practices outside of the context of how they find connection to Western medicine.
Like, you can't separate them and say they're two separate things.
He would always kind of tell me, you know, we have to think about what Western medicine has contributed alongside some of these alternative Ayurvedic medicines and not necessarily see them as separate.
But I think that, yeah, by making these grandiose claims, it's really dangerous and it's really harmful.
My fear is that because of the lack of around yoga and Ayurvedic narratives more globally.
Everyone applies this Orientalist logic, I think, to the way in which people want to give credit to India, want to give credit to Ayurveda for its knowledge and wisdom.
My fear is that You know, we see it happening in the wellness world.
You cover it on your podcast about how people fall for the okey-doke when it comes to ways in which, you know, they think about how yoga can boost one's immunity to basically keep them immune from getting COVID or these herbs that they take every day are going to prevent their lungs from being susceptible to it.
And that's not to say that there isn't Any grain of salt in how these herbs and medicines can help strengthen your body, but to make these grandiose claims that a deadly virus is gonna, you're gonna be immune to it, I think is really dangerous.
There's almost like a predictable hubris involved in fundamentalism that way, that the notion that this pre-modern health practice is going to be able to defeat a novel coronavirus seems to be at the heart of a pride that just is not willing to let go of its conception of the world and how things work.
And reach for outside information because, of course, the shadow of all of this is we've had enough intervention.
We've had enough of foreign interference.
We need to find solutions that grow out of our own soil.
And so I understand that impulse as well.
Right.
And that kind of brings us back to thinking about how decolonization The rhetoric of decolonization gets co-opted in this way that's just about returning to the past in this uncritical way of exploring how it is that we can take care of our health and our body.
Yeah, it reminds me of, we haven't talked about the Kumbh Mela yet, but I think that is an important festival to talk about as it relates to how the narrative around the Kumbh Mela was controlled by Hindu leaders in the state of Uttarakhand.
So this is a festival that It takes place every year but the great Laha Kumbh Mela takes place every 12 years and it's a pilgrimage where Hindus go to Haridwar, this holy city, to bathe and take a dip in the Ganga.
I went there once after my grandmother passed away to take her ashes there.
And over the course of the past couple months, the government had the opportunity to cancel the Maha Kumbh Mela.
There was also influence from astrologers who said, you know, yeah, we understand it's supposed to, the 12th year is actually 2022, but based on these calculations, we think it needs to be in 2021.
Oh, so they actually fudged the 12 years?
They changed the 12 years.
And I don't know how.
Maybe it's like the lining up of their calendar with the Gregorian means that every 70 or 80 years it needs to be moved up by a year.
I think I'm not quite I don't understand it, but that's not the first time I think that that happened.
But they moved it up by a year.
And, you know, mind you, a year ago when Muslims were responsible for like a much more minor super spreader in March of 2020.
The hashtag Corona Jihad basically started trending.
But this year, right, because Modi basically exclaimed to the World Economic Forum, we beat coronavirus, like India has beat coronavirus.
They greenlit The elections and they greenlit this massive Hindu festival, which gained and attracted over.
I've seen estimates of five million.
I've also seen estimates of nine million people over the course of the month.
And on certain big days, at least a million people would come in attendance and take a collective dip in the river, which, you know, if you want to talk about a super spreader, you're bathing in the same water.
And you're also in close proximity in a place where you can't socially distance and where mask enforcement is very lax.
And this was for Hinduism, right?
And one of the chief ministers, I think, of the state said, your faith and your devotion is going to protect you from Corona.
So ostensibly, I mean, we would want to dig into the astrology story a little bit more, but they chose this year to bump it up.
Right.
And it's possible that that was actually the point, that we need this now more than ever.
We need this.
We need the Mahab Kumbh Mela now more than ever.
The stars are aligned in the right way.
We should push up the date and make sure it goes ahead.
But didn't Modi sort of sort of tacitly say, please stay home or don't don't dip too much or something?
Don't dip too much.
About a week ago when the cases were over 300,000 per day.
So.
Right.
But a month ago in the Express Magazine, there was a whole front page basically cover story that was talking and promoting people taking this pilgrimage to the Mahakumbela with Modi's face on it.
And I think the same minister, I think his name is Thabit, I don't remember his full name, basically saying like, you know, because this river is so immortal, it's protected from Corona.
uh or it promotes immortality and it's like you know this holy water that you aren't gonna get sick and so everyone please come and you know and and you can't help but think about like you know the way in which spiritual tourism even applies within the state of India maybe foreign visitors aren't coming right now but it's a country that thrives on tourism and so in what way did they know that developmentally this was going to fuel
The market in Jerez wine, so they promoted it regardless.
I hope I can ask this in a sensitive way.
It makes me wonder, the mindset that allows this to go forward will have political aspects to it.
There will be opportunism.
It might be that the business owners of Hardwar have a lot of political influence and they want it to go forward and they have enough money to feel that they will protect themselves from coronavirus.
But is there also sort of the hint in this that, well, if this is destiny or if this is fate, as we see, you know, in a text like the Bhagavad Gita, that, you know,
An event like this or a tragedy like this is very difficult, but life goes on, we continue, we persevere, we are eternal beings anyway.
That's a way of looking at it that I hadn't thought about.
I could see how that logic could be applied.
I think because maybe I've been tuning into more of the critical tweets or kind of social media posts.
Yeah, it might be too early to say in a sense.
And because of the level of, you know, once the Mahacomela happened, the number of cases drastically rose and all these pilgrims are returning back to their homes in various states.
And so, I think some statistic I read said there's like a 99% positivity rate.
That felt a little high for me to be able to be like, but just to give an idea of how many people are, um, kind of contracting, uh, COVID since returning from the Mahaco Mela, it's escalated exponentially.
And I imagine that there's also this element of, Because we're seeing people who are losing both of their parents at once and becoming orphans overnight.
We're seeing that level of tragedy, the funeral pyres, the massive crematoriums that are being built and running out of wood.
It's such a level of tragedy.
I talked to my aunt the other day, my Masi, and she said, everywhere you go, there's a tragic story.
And I think there, there's a level of waking up to question.
And then I imagine there's also this narrative that you're saying of people who are just like, don't say anything against Modi, right?
There's, um, if you, if you say anything against Modi or against, uh, the government, then you're anti India.
You know, we don't need that negativity.
Uh, and don't be critical of, You know, the government, because, yeah, maybe it was meant to be.
Well, turning finally to your own journey and the essay that first made me aware of you, it's called Cultivating a Yogic Theology of Collective Healing.
You write this passage at the front end that I just wanted to quote here.
You say that my journey in practicing and offering yoga has been ancestral, healing, restorative, enlightening.
It has also been complicated, contradictory, and heartbreaking.
And I think you've given us an introduction to that.
My initial experiences practicing yoga with organized religious and spiritual institutions affirmed a healing space for my brown body.
I was just beginning to question the internalization of white supremacy and colonization on my assimilated mind, body, and spirit.
Unfortunately, the Hindu leaders affiliated with these institutions simultaneously introduced me to oppressive ideologies such as Islamophobia, casteism, and naturalism.
In Searching for Truth, I uncovered the intersecting oppressive legacy that capitalism, colonization, Brahmanical casteism, and nationalism have had on yoga.
Although I believe yoga philosophy, when rooted in a diversity of indigenous philosophies, is grounded in living a life in tune with all beings' liberation, yoga's core principles are misappropriated and commodified for agendas that exacerbate oppression.
Hindus and Western yogis perpetuate the violence of yoga through bypassing the moral tenets for a disembodied, posture-heavy practice that presents a surface-level understanding of humanity's interconnectedness in suffering and liberation.
So, there's a lot there, and it sounds like a whiplash experience, and that you wanted and felt drawn to investigate this heritage that you feel part of, and that gave you rich gifts, and yet over time these jagged edges become exposed.
So, we'll link to this essay, but can you just summarize how you're going to continue to learn about and work on these issues going forward?
Absolutely.
Thanks for reading that piece and for linking it.
So I told you I live in Philadelphia.
I think the most I've learned about my yoga practice has been through or how to embody what I feel is the liberatory aspect of yoga has been through being in relationship with local communities here, such as the Campaign to Bring Mumia Home.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is a longtime political prisoner who I've advocated for his freedom for a long time.
He was entrapped in the case of like murdering a police officer in the 1980s and I was able to I've been able to hold and host and co-curate like fundraisers for him through, you know, yoga embodying yoga in this like liberatory framework and
And the same goes for the MOVE organization, which suffered from a state-sanctioned bombing on their home in the 1980s, which basically murdered 11 of their family members.
And again, I think being invited to be in relationship with those communities has taught me how we can think about healing from trauma that's caused by state violence and structural violence can be used to help empower communities to like be in charge of healing themselves.
So what I'm motivated towards is, you know, in addition to kind of Checking my own caste privilege as somebody of a Kshatriya upper caste community, how can I listen to Dalit and Adivasi and Bahujan voices which are of lower caste communities?
In thinking about how yoga can be purposed toward abolitionism and purposed toward what I would hope to be a yoga liberation theology that is like concerned with the liberation of oppressed peoples, poor people.
And I think on a global level, some of my writings are around like, what would it mean to, you know, build Well, not what I mean.
I'm working on a project called weaponizing yoga, which is basically looking at, uh, as opposed to soft power, but the way in which yoga is being, uh, promoted and used and deployed in militaries, uh, and police, um, policing forces across the globe.
So we see it being used and promoted in, uh, India's armed forces and their border security forces.
We see it being used In Israeli, um, defense forces, which, you know, Israel has a compulsory, uh, military service for, um, its citizens when they're like from 18 to 21 or so.
And, uh, with, and, you know, we see it being used in the case of Israel to advance this occupying ethno national agenda against Palestinians.
Uh, and yet, These governments kind of using yoga to sanitize their reputation to say, we're helping these, um, kind of governments, uh, or sorry, we're helping these soldiers, uh, basically relieve their stress after they, you know, participate in these really stressful jobs.
And, uh, we see it happening with policing.
So like, how is it that my work can expose the way in which yoga is being used to advance And ethics of ethno nationalism or agendas of ethno nationalism and racist capitalism when it comes to policing and and how when it comes to decolonization, can we think about how yoga?
Like, I struggle with the current trends around decolonizing yoga, where it's just trying to put representation of South Asian faces back in yoga in this very flattening way, where South Asians are not, like myself, are not
Checking our caste privilege or our class privilege and how can decolonizing yoga be about us really interrogating the ethical application in this case with the militarism of yoga.
That to me feels like a more substantial way of thinking about how yoga can be decolonized through exposing these really harmful projects of weaponization rather than just
