The parallels between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn

How did the Conservatives become Corbynites asks Bagehot in The Economist





Switch the names, change a few dates and squint a little, and the potted biographies of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn look very similar. After bohemian childhoods in the English countryside and stints at private schools, each makes his home in Islington, cycles a lot and marries thrice (to a much younger spouse on the third occasion). A career in politics is spent on the fringes of their respective parties, communicating with their most loyal fans via columns in the Daily Telegraph (for Mr Johnson) and the Morning Star (for Mr Corbyn). 

Then, abruptly, each finds himself thrust into the leadership by party members frustrated about their wishes being ignored. In the case of Labour’s selectocracy, the desire was for unashamed socialism. Their Conservative cousins yearned for a proper Brexit. As leaders, both are written off by commentators and rivals alike before enjoying a surprise triumph in an election. In the 2017 general election Mr Corbyn was expected to be steamrollered by Theresa May, Mr Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister; instead the Conservatives lost their majority. Two years later Mr Johnson did pulverise Mr Corbyn, winning the Conservatives’ largest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher.

If Mr Johnson’s ascent has been oddly similar to Mr Corbyn’s rise, so too may be his demise. James Johnson (no relation), a pollster who worked for Mrs May, argues Mr Johnson is the Conservative Corbyn: an unpopular leader, dragging towards defeat a party that is split between those deluded enough to support him and those too impotent to stop him. The problems that beset Labour during the Corbyn years are now swallowing the Conservatives.

It starts with the manner of their elections to the leadership. Just like Mr Corbyn, Mr Johnson is not a creature of the parliamentary party. Mr Corbyn derived his authority from Labour members. In 2016 he lost a confidence vote among his mps, yet shamelessly stayed on. Mr Johnson claims his legitimacy from the 14m people who voted Conservative at the election in 2019. The fact that 41% of Conservative mps opposed him in a confidence vote in June can therefore be dismissed. That creates a surreal situation in which two-thirds of the House of Commons would rather the prime minister was gone. Constitutionally, it is a mess. But Mr Johnson cares little about such disorder.

Delusion has sunk in among Mr Johnson’s remaining acolytes. In the wake of two dire by-election defeats on June 23rd, Tory flunkeys were reduced to arguing that the Conservatives won more votes across both seats, akin to a relegated football manager pointing out his team’s sturdy goal difference. Such derangement has echoes of Labour figures in 2019 who, in the wake of their worst result since 1935, claimed that the party had “won the argument”.

The ineptitude of his internal enemies was the main reason Mr Corbyn stayed in power. When a leadership challenge was launched Mr Corbyn’s opponents alighted on Owen Smith, then the mp for Pontypridd, as a candidate. His most notable moment in the campaign came when he accidentally implied he had a 29-inch penis. He lost. Mr Johnson is similarly blessed when it comes to his enemies. Conservative plotters lumbered into a poorly timed leadership contest at the start of June, a few weeks before Mr Johnson’s electoral popularity was found badly wanting in the by-elections. Organising another crack at him will take time.

In each case, some mps stay loyal because they have no prospects under another leader. Some of the 2019 intake of Conservative mps are lucky to be employed, never mind in Parliament. Mr Corbyn introduced the world to Richard Burgon, an mp whose hidden talents remained just that during a brief foray onto the front bench. Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary and Mr Johnson’s staunchest ally, may be the most successful novelist in cabinet since Disraeli, but the comparisons end there.

Mr Corbyn and Mr Johnson also share an ability to drive opponents to near insanity. Mr Johnson seems sometimes to be regarded as the first politician ever to tell fibs in office, when he is just the latest to do so. When home secretary, for example, Mrs May launched a salvo at the concept of human rights after someone could not be deported “because—and I am not making this up—he had a pet cat”. (Reader, she was making it up.) Likewise, Mr Corbyn threw out a range of often reasonable, if offbeat, policies such as increased provision of free school meals or free broadband, which generated disproportionately angry reactions. Rage at their faults blinded opponents to the qualities of both men; it is impossible to understand an enemy if you cannot appreciate his appeal.
Jeremy Johnson

Yet the critics are also right to be furious. Mr Corbyn did, eventually, lead his party to electoral destruction. The Labour leader was, notoriously, the dimmest member of the party’s left-wing rump, with noxious views on everything from anti-Semitism to Russia. Voters sniffed that out. Likewise, Mr Johnson is manifestly unsuited to the job of prime minister. Brexit, which Mr Johnson did more than any other politician to bring about, has been a slow-moving disaster, throttling the British economy just as its critics warned.

Such vindication, however, is worth little on its own. And as any Labour mp can confirm, changing leader—even an unpopular one—does not solve everything. Under his aegis Mr Corbyn’s critics argued the party would be 20 points ahead of the then wobbling Conservatives with any other leader. It is now three years since Mr Corbyn stepped down as leader. Despite the backdrop of an unpopular prime minister, police investigations into Downing Street and rocketing inflation, Labour cannot even sustain a double-digit lead in the polls. Allies of Sir Keir Starmer, Mr Corbyn’s successor as party leader, blame “long Corbyn” for this slack performance. At the dispatch box Mr Johnson brings up Mr Corbyn whenever he can. When the time comes, Labour will happily repay the favour. Long Boris may linger, too.

'The Press Decides Which Revolutions To Report'- Arundhati Roy

The celebrated dissenter on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, mass uprisings in the Arab world, the Anna Hazare movement, her old comrades-in arm like Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, Maoism, writing and much else.

Rajesh Joshi

 

Rajesh Joshi: The 10th anniversary of September the 11th attacks on the US is upon us. What do you think has changed in the world, or hasn’t changed, in these years?
Arundhati Roy: Plenty has changed. The numbers of wars that are being fought has been expanded and the rhetoric that allows those wars —that are essentially a battle for resources —is now disguised in the rhetoric of the war on terror, and has become more acceptable in some ways and yet more transparent in other ways.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing that has happened is that increasingly we are seeing that these wars can’t be won. They can be initiated. But they can’t be won. Like the war in Vietnam was not won. The war in Iraq has not been won. The war in Afghanistan has not been won. The war on Libya will not be won. There is this initial pattern where you claim victory and then these occupation forces get mired in a kind of slow war of attrition. That’s also partially responsible for the global economy slowly coming apart.

The other difficulty is that the more the weapons of conventional warfare become nuclear —and all this kind of air bombing and so on —the more it becomes clear to people who are fighting occupations that you can’t win a conventional war. So, ironically the accumulation of conventional weaponry is leading to different kinds of terrorism and suicide bombings and a sort of desperate resort to extremely violent resistances. Violent, ideologically as well, because you have to really motivate people to want to go and blow themselves up. So, [it's a ] very, very dangerous time.

You have been very critical of the war on terror, especially the US policy. Would you have preferred a Saddam Hussain or a Taliban regime in Afghanistan?

Well, it does look as if the Taliban regime is going to return in Afghanistan in some form or shape. And obviously, people like Saddam Hussain were first created and put in place and supported and funded and armed by the US. This process is something that a country that seeks hegemonic power can put in the despots it wants, topple them when it wants and then get mired in these kinds of battles where eventually it’s having to desperately scramble to get some foothold of a some face-saving measure in, say, Afghanistan. So, eventually, you are not ever going to get rid of despots or dictators or Taliban. The Taliban was also created by them. That kind of ideology was almost handed out as a kind of weaponry by them at the time they were fighting the Soviets which nobody really mentions. They just talk about Pakistan having had those camps but those camps were actually funded by the CIA and by Saudi Arabia, which is now one of the greatest despotic regimes wholly embraced by the US.

How do you look at the mass uprisings across the Arab world? Do you think it’s a positive development?

Obviously there are very positive things about it but the jury is still out on them, in terms of what happened in Egypt for instance. Hosni Mubarak was in power for 40 years. We knew that three months before the uprising in Tahrir Square, the papers were reporting that he was on his death bed. Then this uprising happened. And then you had such enthusiastic reporting by the western press about the uprising — the press decides which revolutions to report and which not to report and therein lies politics. You had similar huge uprisings, let’s say in Kashmir which was more or less blacked out and yet you had this being reported very enthusiastically but at the end of it you had headlines which said: 'Egypt Free, Army Takes Over'.

And today there are ten thousand people being tried in military tribunals. There is probably the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood happening now; it’s a negotiated emergence. I would say that it would be a successful uprising and a real democracy if they manage to completely stop the Egyptian role in the siege of Gaza. I don’t know if that’s going to happen.

There are lots of manipulations going on. In India, as well as in these places, there is also the use of people’s power. People are angry. People are genuinely furious. People who have lived under these despotic regimes are desperate. But just moving the big blocks a little bit allows an eruption to take place. Is that eruption really going to end up in a genuine democracy or is that anger going to be channelised into something else?... We are still waiting.

Aren’t you happy that dictatorships are falling like a pack of cards?

I would be happy if they were not going to be replaced by military regimes. I would be happy if I was sure that whatever takes its place isn’t going to be another manipulation... I would be happy. But at this moment in Egypt, people are being picked and tried in military tribunals just the way they were under Hosni Mubarak. Of course, I am happy but why should you be celebrating something unless what you are celebrating is the right thing?

You have been supporting people’s movements everywhere but you are very critical of the Anna Hazare movement. Common people participated in the movement, after all.

I don’t support all people’s movements. I certainly didn’t support the Ram Janambhumi movement which was one of the largest people's movement in this country – the movement to topple the Babri masjid and build a temple there. I think all kinds of fascism could describe itself as people’s movements and I don’t support fascism. I am not an indiscriminate supporter of people’s movements. In this particular case, I think it’s very important to read what was going on and what was going on was not simple. We are at a stage where huge corruption scandals mostly involving mining corporations and telecom companies and so on have been exposed for their links to the government, links to the media, for looting billions of dollars and there is no accountability, neither from the government nor from the corporations. And there is a huge amount of popular anger against them.

The reason I am very suspicious about what is happening here is that I feel that this anger from the top to the bottom is channelised into a people’s movement and that anger which was a very amorphous anger was being used to push through this very specific piece of legislation which I don’t think anybody— including a lot of the people who were pushing it— has read. And if you read that bill, it is not only legally ludicrous but the people who call themselves Team Anna themselves said that people were angry and we provided them the medicine. The Team Anna are themselves saying that the people didn’t read the bill but they said ‘give us some medicine for the sickness’, but they didn’t read what it said on the label of the medicine bottle. Very, very few people have read it. And that medicine is far more dangerous than the illness itself. That’s why I am worried. Then it became this moral movement which started to use the old symbols of religious fascism that all of us have seen, that started to exclude the minorities.

Some of your comrades-in arm like Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan are part of that movement. How can you say that the movement has streaks of fascism? Do you doubt Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan’s integrity or is it their understanding?

It’s not a question of doubting their integrity. I doubt their (Prashant Bhushan and Medha Patkar’s) understanding for sure on the Lokpal bill — I am not doubting their integrity. Neither of them has brought in the politics they spent their life time doing; they left it outside at the doorstep. I just want somebody to have a proper conversation about that bill that they were insisting be passed without discussion through Parliament by the 30th of August. If you look at the bill, it’s so terrifying. Firstly, it’s so un-worked out. It asks for ten people of integrity —and proper class —to be running a bureaucracy that would contain about 30,000 officers. There is no comment on where those officers are coming from, who they are; there is no idea of what you mean by corruption in a society like ours. Sure there is corruption — from poor people having to bribe government officers to get their ration bills to corporates paying and getting rivers and mountains to mine for free.
But corruption is a value system, which has to be pinned to a legal system. And I keep saying that there are huge numbers, millions of Indians, who live untitled and unidentified outside this legal system. Supposing you live in Delhi. You have huge number of slums, illegal hawkers, squatters' settlements. Suddenly some middle class community can say, ‘I live in Jorbagh there is a slum there, it’s illegal. The politicians are keeping them there because they get votes; the municipalities are allowing them because they get bribes. Get them out of here. These are illegal people’. What’s the meaning of corruption has not been debated. Forget the fact that they are asking for a bill where these ten people are at the top and there is an additional bureaucracy of 30,000 who will be given a huge amount of money by the government and they have the right to prosecute, to sentence, to tap phones, to dismiss, to suspend and to enquire into the activities of everybody from the PM to the judiciary downwards. They are just setting up a parallel hierarchy! What’s happening is that the middle class which has benefited from these policies of privatisation and globalisation has become impatient with democracy.

If globalisation and privatisation is not the answer, according to you, then what is?

I think that the only way that we can begin to move to a place where people have some rights is by learning how to become an opposition which demands accountability. What the Jan Lokpal bill does is to set up another Super Cop. I am saying that the beginning of moving towards a society that we would like to live in is to force accountability. And that is only when people begin to stand by those who are fighting for their rights and demand that something happens. Not when they look away and say: that’s not my problem that people are being killed in Dantewada. I am a middle-class person and I believe that I should benefit. If we live in a democracy and you believe that everybody does have certain minimum rights, then you’ve got to be able to open your eyes to it. That’s what I try and do in whatever way I could by standing by those resistance movements that are questioning everything from big dams to mining to all these things—who are refusing to give up their lands, who are standing up to the biggest powers, whether it’s the army or the corporations and all of that.

You are a fierce critic of the Manmohan Singh government’s economic policies but India’s development has been praised by President Barack Obama of the US and British Prime Minister David Cameron. Many would say you are using your celebrity status as a Booker Prize winner author to criticise the path that India has taken after the collapse of the Soviet Union?

Booker Prize and all that is meaningless. There are plenty of famous people who can use their fame to sell shoes or coca cola. Nobody can use their fame meaninglessly. For me, I am a writer; I am somebody who sees the world in a particular way. And I keep saying that these words like ‘India’s development’ have become meaningless because who is India? When you say 'India' are you talking about the few hundred billionaires or are you talking about the 830 million people who live on less than 20 rupees a day? Surely, some people in India have developed very fast beyond their wildest dreams but they have done that by standing on the shoulders and the bodies of large number of other Indians. I keep saying when you have ten people in a room and one person become a billionaire and two people are doing really well and the rest of seven are starving and someone says, 'Hey, there are seven people are starving in this room', and you say, 'Why are you being negative? People have developed!' It doesn’t matter who I am, what I won, what I didn’t win. If I am saying something that is relevant it will have a place in this world. If I am being stupid, if I am being negative, if I am being meaningless, I won’t have a place in this world. So, there is no point in personalising things because it doesn’t really help.

Is Maoism the answer?
Of course it’s not the answer. However, as I keep saying what I believe is the answer is the diversity of resistance and the Maoists are at one end — the very militant end of the diversity. And they fight deep in the forests which are being filled with paramilitary and police and surely in that tribal village where no television camera ever reaches, where no Gandhian hunger strike is ever going to make the news, there is only the possibility of an armed resistance. Outside, that armed resistance will be crushed in a minute. The Maoists have not had any success outside. You need to look at other kind of resistance outside. The resistance movements often confuse the necessity for tactical differences with ideological differences. But the fact is that one of the things I think is wonderful in India is that there is a huge bandwidth of resistance movements who are being very effective and who are insisting on their rights and who are winning some battles. When you come back to this business of corruption, I would like to say that you have hundreds of secret memorandums of understanding (MoUs) between the governments and private corporations, which will result in a kind of social engineering across central India — forests, mountains, rivers — all of it given away to corporations. Millions of people are fighting for their rights. Nobody stood there and said can you declare those MoUs.

What does the state do? It has to defend itself.

Implicit in that statement is that the state is the enemy of the people and it has to defend itself. And if you see what’s happening in the world, increasingly that’s true that states and their armies are turning upon what traditionally were their own peoples. Wars are not always being fought between countries; they are also being fought by the state against their own people — a kind of vertical colonisation as opposed to a horizontal one.

Do you love to mess with power?

I do believe that the only way to keep power accountable is to always question it, to always mess with it in some way or the other.

Some people would say it’s very convenient of you to criticise things from a safe corner. What do you think your role is going to be in the future? Are you going to be a writer or have you every thought of joining politics?

It’s not a serious question, I am afraid. What I do is politics. What I write is politics. Traditionally this is what writers have done. So to separate commentary from writing, from politics, minimises politics, minimises writing, and minimises commentary. This has historically been the role of writers. I could surely go and wear a khadi sari and sit in the forest and become a martyr but that’s not what I plan to do. I have no problem being who I am, writing what I have because I am not playing for sainthood here. I am not playing for popularity. I am not asking to be hailed as a leader of the masses. I am a writer who has a particular set of views and I use whatever skills I have, I deploy whatever skills I have, whatever means I have to write about them, not always on my own behalf but from the heart of the resistance.

In an interview to Financial Times you once said, and I quote: “I feel like I’ve done a very interesting journey over the last 11 years, but now I’m ready to do something different. Two years ago, I told myself, ‘no more, enough of this’, and I was working on some fiction. Then this huge uprising happened in Kashmir.” Some would say your activism is just another career move — I’ve done this and now let’s move on and do something more exciting?

It’s not about more exciting things, it’s about writing again. If I am a writer and I have written in a certain way, then suddenly you feel like, for example The God of Small Things is a very political book but then there became another phase of very urgent and immediate politics and it became non-fiction. But I think fiction is a deeper, more subversive kind of politics. Like if you read The God of Small Things, dealing with issues of caste for example. It’s not about the government or the state versus the people; it’s about the absolute malaise within your own society. Fiction is a much better way of dealing with it. You can’t allow yourself to just be bogged down doing the same thing, thinking the same ways or using the same techniques of writing. It’s always a challenge. And it can never be that I will stop being a political person. Of course, I think that everybody, even a fashion model, is political. It’s the kind of politics you choose is what you choose to do. There is no escaping that. This idea that politics is only going out and standing for elections or addressing rallies is a very superficial thing.

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Rajesh Joshi works with BBC Hindi Service where this interview was first broadcast in Hindi

The great age of Britain's popular press is drawing squalidly to its close

by Ian Jack in The Guardian

Who will mourn the passing of the News of the World? The staff will, especially those not recruited by the Sun on Sunday. A pure-minded lover of Pakistani cricket might, thanking "the fake sheikh" for exposing the national team's easy corruption. This week everyone hates the News of the World, and yet only last Sunday around 2.6 million people liked it enough to buy a copy. They didn't mind what they were reading, so long as they didn't know how some of it came to be written. And they didn't mind that too much, either – if they knew about phone hacking, they overlooked it – until it came to the case of the abducted and then murdered girl, Milly Dowler.

We own what the Victorians knew as our baser selves. When the News of the World first appeared in 1843, Britain was embarking on a long age of public respectability in which salacious accounts of sex and violence were hard to find. The News of the World made this a specialism, mainly by reporting court cases no other paper would touch. The education acts of 1870 and 1880 spread literacy through every social class and hugely expanded the reading public. By 1914, the paper was selling a couple of million copies a week, all of them deliciously published on a day nominally devoted to worship and quiet reflection. In its peak year, 1949, the circulation averaged close to 8.5m and required not a parcels van or two but a whole train to take Scottish copies north from the presses in Manchester.

It was, by then, the world's biggest-selling newspaper – a publishing triumph owned by an English family, the Carrs, that exploited an otherwise unsatisfied appetite for sexual voyeurism and scandal. At 11 o'clock in church: remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Behind one's lavatory door at 12: Vicar Denies Weekend in Caravan. "As British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding," was how its then editor described his paper during the takeover battle of 1969 (and everyone knew that the loser, Robert Maxwell, was a Czech).

Whether hypocrisy is a peculiarly British vice is debatable; other societies may be just as two-faced in different ways. But understanding the difference between how people were supposed to be and how they actually were became a key weapon for the pioneers of British popular newspaper journalism when universal primary education delivered new audiences in the late 19th century. Social reformers and educationalists thought of reading in terms of self-improvement and a more skilled workforce – a moral and economic good. A new breed of newspaper publishers, of which Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe) was by far the most inventive, saw a less worthy side. He spread the message to his staff like a preacher: roughly, to subvert the words of Philip Larkin, readers were forever surprising a hunger in themselves to be more trivial.
"Crime exclusives are noticed by the public more than any other sort of news," Northcliffe told his news editor at the Daily Mail, Tom Clarke, in 1921. "They attract attention, which is the secret of newspaper success. They are the sort of dramatic news the public always affects to criticise but is always in the greatest hurry to read. Watch the sales during a big murder mystery, especially if there is a woman in it. It is a revelation of how much the public is interested in realities, action and mystery. It is only human."

Northcliffe first put his "only human" principle to work as the 22-year-old editor-publisher of a little weekly, Answers to Correspondents, which told its readers how many MPs had glass eyes (three) or cork legs (one), and how tall Gladstone was (5ft 9ins!), and adjudicated debates over whether women lived longer than men and if snakes could kill pigs. Later he would say that his fortune had been founded on useless information, but by then he could afford to make jokes about his youth, having in the meantime launched the Daily Mail (1896) and the Daily Mirror (1903), and bought the Observer (1905) and the Times (1908). No one did more to shape the future of British journalism. Northcliffe divided news into two main divisions – reports of happenings and what he called "talking points", where his reporters would develop the topics people were discussing, or stimulate new ones. "What a great talking point," he told Clarke when he read that Paris had decided skirts should be long. "Every woman in the country will be excited about it. We must start an illustrated discussion on 'THE BATTLE OF THE SKIRTS: LONG v SHORT.' Get different people's views. Cable to New York and Paris, get plenty of sketches by well-known artists … print as many as you can … plenty of legs."

Such enterprising devotion to the frivolous – and to women – had never before been heard in a newspaper office. In this, he prefigured the modern British editor; similarly, his close relationships with politicians made him the model for the modern British proprietor. During the first world war he met a young Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch, and adopted him as a kind of editorial pupil. Promoted to an editorship in Melbourne, Murdoch emulated the maestro's techniques and forged his own political alliances, so much so he got the nickname Lord Southcliffe. His only son, Rupert, learned the trade at his knee.

Northcliffe had an unhappy end. He became paranoid and issued bewildering instructions that his staff, trained to oblige his imperiousness, never knew how to disobey. He appointed a Daily Mail concierge as the censor of advertisements, he saw two moons in the sky at Biarritz, at Boulogne he tried to push a railway porter into the sea. Perrier water became an obsession, and on the train from Dover to London he drank 13 bottles of it. (In the spirit of Answers, I can't resist the information that his brother, St John Harmsworth, bought the French spring that was then in the custody of a Dr Perrier. St John bottled the water in bottles shaped like Indian clubs and gave a few to Sir Thomas Lipton, which the grocery magnate pressed on King Edward VII, who gave Perrier a royal warrant. Bingo.)

He died under the supervision of two nurses in a hut on the roof of a house in Carlton Gardens. Neurosyphilis has always been strongly rumoured, but never proved. It was an organic psychosis of some sort, in a mind that had been unsteadied by power. In his last days, he ordered hundreds of sackings, but he had always been a brisk sacker: "My dear Tom Clarke, Fire [name deleted]. Chief" is a memo reproduced by Clarke in his fascinating memoir. An editor who said she wasn't to blame for her paper's criminal behaviour because she'd been on holiday at the time? Her feet (I like to think) would never have touched the ground.

For the moment Rebekah Brooks stays, but all around her the great age of Britain's popular press is tumbling squalidly to its close.

Yoga: New 'Om' of good sex life!

 

NONA WALIA 10 September 2009, 12:00am IST

To beat fatigue in the bedroom, yoga is the new Om of sexual well-being.

Sex it up with yoga! (Getty Images)

In yoga studios of suburban Delhi, there's a new asana for sexuality, which is bringing a revolution in the lives of men and women. Delhi-based yoga expert Mini Shastri advises Surya Namaskar every morning for a scared sexual connection.

" Surya Namaskar is a combination of 12 different poses, back bends, forward bends. While doing the namaskar you contract and expand your nerves to the pelvic girdle, which is your sexual core. This stimulates your sexual hormones and helps you achieve a new sexual equilibrium. While kundalini yoga is also beneficial for a better sex life. For instance, vrkasana or the scorpio pose helps your reproductive organs.''

AWAKE YOUR SENSUAL BEING
Ellen Barrett's book Sexy Yoga, is designed to open up seven chakras (energy centers) that involve sexuality: root, sacral and heart. "Yoga means union or yoke in Sanskrit, and it focuses on bringing the body into harmony with the mind and spirit. The awareness of sexuality through yoga is deeper and more intimate. Yoga is about discovering the joys of elegant sexuality,'' says Barrett.

Why are more people rediscovering the yogic position on sexuality? "Yoga helps you in creating a balance. Kundalini yoga helps you create bio-energy, It activates your sex hormones. There's a spiritual connection between yoga, sex and celibacy on the other. Yoga helps you achieve your needs, you can be celibate or satisfied sexually through yoga, it helps you supress or express sexual desire. Kundalini yoga is a bio-science of sexuality and psychology. It can rejuvenate through breathing exercises, which enhance consciousness, with bio-magnetic awareness, you can use your charms sexually. We have higher forms of prayananam ,'' says Kundalini yoga expert, Meena Nanda, who teaches dynamic life management for well-being.

DO WE REALLY NEED NUDE YOGA?
Perhaps, some people are taking yoga for sensuality a bit too far. Like New York-based ashtanga yoga teacher Aaron Star is the founder of Hot Nude Yoga, which combines ashtanga and vinyasa yoga session. "The students discover breathing techniques that will help you to relax and bliss out. The practice involves the classic stretching postures and breathing exercises, coordinated with chanting and meditation to stimulate the release of so-called kundalini energy. It uses the energy of sex to raise the kundalini energy to the higher chakras. It is a good idea to be a regular practitioner of ordinary yoga before you embark on yoga for sex,'' says Star.

MUDRAS FOR SEXUAL HEALING
Sexologist Dr Prakash Kothari believes, yoga is the perfect for emotional, sexual and spiritual well-being. "There are certain asanas that enhance physical intimacy -- bhramari prayanam , chanting of Om with eyes and ears closed reduces anxiety, helps in contracting and expanding sexual nerves. While vajrasana helps in erectile dysfunctions, vajroli and ashwini mudra can help pregnant women pursue a healthy sex life after delivery. These mudras help the pelvic muscles. I also advise surya namaskar to those who have endrocrine imbalance. If you follow these excercises, yoga can really improve your sex life.''

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