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By Anshu Vyas Seetharaman, Secretary WICCIKAYOGA.
After a fairly successful career in Advertising and later in Fitness training and management with corporates and gyms, Anshu turned to Yoga. She began teaching yoga at a temple hall at Sri Mahan Odukathur Swamigal Mutt & Sri Dhandayudhapani Swamy Temple from 2009-2015 and has been teaching yoga at Sri Aurobindo Society since 2015 at their Bangalore venue, an erstwhile palace of the maharaja of Nepal. Anshu completed her MSc in yoga from SVYASA Yoga University in 2024.
This August the Bollywood industry celebrated 25 years of the mega hit romantic musical ‘TAAL’ (1999) directed by the acclaimed director Mr Subhash Ghai. ‘Taal’ remains one of the best works of composer A.R Rahman till date. We all know that ‘Taal’s’ song tracks- ‘Taal se Taal milao’, ‘Ishq bina’, ‘Nahin samne tu’ and ‘Ramta jogi’ broke all records and boundaries set by other composers of Bollywood songs. The melodious songs and lilting music still echo in our ears. The dances and the casting did also set the movie apart.
As we look at other facts of this movie, I must add that as a growing yoga practitioner in 1999, the movie ‘Taal’ caught my eye for it features Yoga, well, a lot of yoga practiced in the movie by none other than actor Aishwarya Rai. When I watched the movie, I was at that juncture in life when I had already made up my mind about a career switch to fitness. I had decided to not go back to my previous profession (advertising), and had started teaching fitness to corporates in Bangalore to stay fit and earn a living. Fitness was a serious growing industry at that time and certainly more scientific, professional and more glamorous than yoga with Jane Fonda workout videos, fitness videos and ‘Reebok training’ accessible to trainers and the mandatory calculation of the ideal exercise heart rate for clients and learning to isolate, work and stretch various muscle groups. There was the must-have branded fitness gear from Reebok, Nike, Puma etc., with gym franchises mushrooming in India and the world over. Fitness music was available with progressive beats per minute according to the type of workout- floor/step and intensity. While yoga, a genesis of India, was still more practiced in the west (renowned yoga teachers such as BKS Iyengar and Pottabi Jois had set up many classes in the west), yoga was business-wise a non-organised sector in India. As part of my fitness sessions, I would borrow stretches from yoga as part of my warm-up and cool-down while doing a longer yoga routine for myself as per my level of learning and flexibility. Yogasana practice to me till then was not glamorized as I came from a meditation background and had recently joined formal training classes in yoga with Shri H.S Arun of Prashant Yogashraya where a lot of emphasis was placed on discipline and alignment. Coming back to the movie ‘Taal’ I must confess that seeing yoga on the large screen on 35 mm in ‘Taal’, was larger than life. The immensely beautiful leading lady ‘Aishwarya Rai’ played a dancer cum children’s yoga teacher in the movie. Instead of routine dancing around trees to depict a budding romance, there was a substantial sequence of her teaching yogasanas to the brilliant male lead played by Akshaye Khanna in the picturesque ranges of Himachal Pradesh, from dawn to sunrise that very convincingly progressed the story. The Yoga scene was breathtaking and sensually shot in the great outdoors. The energy was palpable, you could breathe the silence of the mountains and the yoga lured me and transported me there from my classroom to the spell-binding himalayas. Today destination yoga is cool and instagrammable but way back then it was not easy to even train to be a yoga teacher due to logistics. In ‘Taal’ the Yoga poses were executed very well with alignment and precision and shot to perfection. You have to see those yoga sequences from ‘Taal’ to believe me. A big shout out to whoever directed those yogasanas. Some of the yogasanas featured in the movie were Ardh Katichakrasana, Ushtrasana, Chakrasana, Hastuttanasana, Padhastasana, Veerbhadrasana series, Hanumanasana, Trikonasana, Vrkshasana, Garudasana, Ashvasanchalanasana, Prasaritapadottanasana, Urdhvamukhadhanurasana, Ardhmatsyendrasana, Halasana and Sirsasana.
Yoga as the vocation of the leading lady really suited the young budding actor Aishwarya Rai. Her personality and quiet demeanor were enhanced by Yoga. Composure, restraint and vairagya (detachment), the teachings of Yoga practice were built into the storyline. The director has kept in mind how a yoga person would react and handle circumstances. You can see the character’s stable mental state. It was correctly depicted that Yoga sessions after disturbing situations helped the protagonist to keep her cool as is often the case in real life situations of yoga practitioners. I am sure the yoga in the movie would have led to many new followers and practitioners of yoga. Overall, the movie looks well researched and the character of the artists well etched out , however it was not clearly established in the movie how the dancer is also a yoga teacher, this could be attributed to teaching of yoga not being a recognized profession then whereas dancing (classical or western) was a recognized profession just like teachers of other subjects such as science and humanities.
With all restrictions, the director has created a masterpiece paying equal emphasis to Yoga and dance and should seriously consider making a movie on Yoga alone. Now that Yoga is set to be included as a demonstration sport at the 2026 Asian Games in Nagoya, Japan and is being pitched as a sport for the 2036 Olympics there will be many real-life yoga stories of struggle, worthy of being made into a stand-alone Yoga movie.
Although classical dance and Yoga are inseparable, what lends credibility to Aishwarya Rai’s role in ‘Taal’ is that several dance sequences have yoga poses in them such as ‘Ramta Jogi’ featuring her with Anil Kapoor and a bevy of energetic dancers. The dances in ‘Taal’ were choreographed by Saroj Khan, Shaimak Davar and Ahmad Khan. In my early twenties I had experienced formal training in Odissi (a classical dance form) where the warm-up alone is highly rigorous. I had not progressed with Odissi beyond a year but seeing the possibility of yoga and dance complementing each other so beautifully in this movie had made me regret giving up learning dance. But never mind I had told myself as I could always progress my yoga learning.
I highly recommend that everyone watch this movie again to enjoy the sound track and dances shot in Himachal Pradesh and also for its graceful yoga sequence. ‘Taal’ became the first Indian film to reach the top 20 on Variety’s box office list.
We all know that Yoga helps to focus the mind razor sharp for winning and yogasanas improve the flexibility of the body and serves as a highly effective warm-up and cool-down sequence for dancers and athletes due to the localized stretching it provides.
Another recognition for ‘Taal’- the USA Artistic Swimming team at The Paris Olympics’24 choreographed their sequence to the music from ‘Taal’. Here is a link to view their performance:
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