Yoga at the Gandhi Museum

Our time in Madurai is less about site-seeing and more about experiencing Becky's life and world here. We visited her program and met the head of the program and some of the workers and her professors - all of whom told me how beloved Becky is.

Other than breakfast at the hotel, we have not eaten out at a restaurant in Madurai - every meal has been at Becky's host family. So, it's a lot of authentic South India life - at least, for a family like Becky's host family.

They are a family of doctors and reasonably well off by India standards. Like many middle class Indians, they have servants in the house who do much of the cleaning and cooking.

We eat with our hands, no utensils. The food is served on banana leaves.

Not far from our hotel is the Gandhi museum. The museum tracks Gandhi's career from his time in South Africa to his assassination. We ran into a class of girls from a teaching college. They couldn't stop giggling with us - because, in Madurai, we are so exotic - they just never saw Americans. Becky says this is a common experience for her in Tamil Nadu.

Gandhi had been to Madurai and it was here where he chose to shed his western lawyer clothes for the traditional khadi (loin cloth and shawl). This was not a huge surprise to me - when we arrived in Maddurai from our night train, I observed rail workers wearing such clothing - I had not seen this at all in North India.

I wanted to take a yoga class in India. I asked the hotel concierge, but they were useless. Fortunately, Becky's host sister Devi has a friend who takes yoga classes at the Gandhi museum. She arranged for me to take a yoga class there. When the yogi heard I was coming, he arranged for a private class for me with one of his students/teachers.

The class was great. After the class, the head yogi came over to meet me. Turns out he is the director of the Gandhi museum. When I told him I was from California, he laughed and said that California has supplanted India as the world center of yoga.

He is a student of comparative religion and, like Dr. V, he is fascinated with Judaism. As it was Saturday, he wished me a Shabbat Shalom, and had all his students say "Shabbat shalom."

He told me about an interfaith conference he'd attended in Europe and that one religious highlight for him was attending a Passover seder. He informed me that there is no book about Judaism in the Tamil language and he asked if I would work with him on a primer about Judaism that he could publish in Tamil. I told him I would send him a good book on this subject - easier for him to translate an existing good intro to Judaism than to write a new one.

I was gonna take an auto rickshaw back to the hotel, but my teacher gave me a lift on the back of his motorcycle.