“Funny,” mused a friend in some confusion when she heard about my escapade at the last film festival, “I always thought of you as … a yogi.” Indeed, the guy whom I almost choked to death right in the middle of the upper square in view of a startled crowd would never think of me that way. “And yet,” I tried to defend myself, “an entire chapter of the autobiography of an illustrious yogi written in the first half of last century was dedicated to a yogi who used to kill tigers with his bare hands in front of gasping audiences.” Like a lead balloon, my excuse went exactly nowhere. “Killing tigers…,” my friends whispered and averted her eyes in horror. “Well,” I went on anxiously, burying myself ever deeper into shit, “back then tigers were far from being endangered.” The Bhagavad Gita came to me at once, but I gave up in time. Who would believe it contained the heart of yoga when it was set just before a fierce battle in which the chief protagonist was likely to lose his life?

Addendum (April 3, 2016)

The friend from this story was Vanda Vučinić, David Plant’s then girlfriend and now wife, who had heard about my escapade at the film festival a fortnight earlier (“The Joy of Strangling,” July 26, 2007). She offers a perfect example of how yogis are perceived in the so-called west. Benevolence incarnate, that is. Back then, David Gordon White’s Sinister Yogis (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009) was not yet out. As it turns out, I fit the disparaging perception of yogis rather well. A cheerful murderer, no less. The next time I see Vanda and Dave, I will recommend White’s book to them both.