It’s one thing to understand India English. Surviving in the shala is completely different, requiring specific terminology which I refer to as ‘Sharath English’.
Sharath actually speaks pretty good English. On Sundays, he conducts Conference, speaking for up to twenty minutes on his chosen topic for the day and then answering questions from students. He is confident and fluent, plus he jokes. And his jokes are good too.
During practice, Sharath uses just enough words to get his point across. Forget about all the extra fluff eg. prepositions, articles and correct tenses. Sharath and his mum, Saraswati, use the bare minimum. And I don’t blame them since they have to police sixty people a session, doing different things on their mats, with ten or more people waiting their turn in the foyer. They definitely need to conserve their energy.
The shala’s actually very quiet. Students rarely speak, although I’ve heard moans of pain, squeals of fear and once in a blue moon, a shrieked vulgarity. During Mysore classes, Sharath and Saraswati mainly speak when they’re calling someone into the room to start practice. Sharath will sometimes give individual instructions for poses. During Led class, they just call out the poses and count the vinyasa (ie movements connecting the poses). If Sharath is in a good or mean mood, he’ll crack some jokes or give us grief.
I’ve compiled a collection of commonly used phrases that Sharath uses. It’s quite important to understand the shala vocabulary because the last thing you want to do is to piss him off by not doing what he wants you to.
Entry into the Shala language:
• “One more” – probably what you hear most in the shala. Used to call someone in.
• “You come” – normally comes after “One more’ is repeated with no movement from the foyer. Then, he’ll point at someone and say, “You come!”
• “Don’t fear” – used when people hesitate at the door, either because they’re not sure if “You come” is referring to them or because the pecking order is disturbed when Sharath calls specific people in out of turn.
• Amidst the sea of sweaty bodies in the room, it’s sometimes quite hard to tell where the empty spot in the room is. People will stand in the middle of the room, looking around blindly. That’s when Sharath / Saraswati will give you instructions:
“You come front”.
“You come straight” - which doesn’t mean straight towards them. It means straight into the middle of the room or
“You go back” - to the back of the room, not back out to the foyer.
• If Sharath senses someone has come earlier than the time he has stipulated (and trust me, he actually remembers!), you’ll get a stern,
“You! What is your time?”.
• If you’re not kosher, that may be followed with “You wait” or “You don’t come early. You come 8 o’clock”.
• As people in the earlier batches leave, Sharath will move people up with,
“Tomorrow you come early. 6 o’clock”.
Pose-related language:
• If you’re doing a pose wrongly or out of the ordinary, Sharath will say,
“You! What you do?!”
• That is also used if he is checking on the last pose in the sequence you’ve done,
“What you do? Bhujapidasana you do?”.
If the student nods and he’s happy with how you’re done it, you may get the next pose, “Tomorrow, Kurmasana you do”.
• In backbends, you start by lying on your back, put your palms by your ears, then push yourself up, lifting your back and butt off the ground. With arms and legs as straight as possible, the aim then is to deepen the backbend by walking in your hands towards your feet. This is pretty intense. Sharath’s ‘encouragement’ here will be,
“Straight arms. Walk … walk … walk!”
• At this point, elbows will usually bend as students tire. Once as a student’s forearms collapsed onto the ground, instead of saying “Walk”, I heard him say with a smile, “Crawl!”
• The next stage in backbending is to drop back into a backbend from a standing position. It can be quite scary because you don’t know if your hands will reach the ground before your head does. Inevitably, someone will hit their head on the ground with a loud thump. Sharath’s usual response will be,
“Don’t break the floor. Next time wear helmet”
• In Conference today he was talking about why his family doesn’t eat garlic – it has medicinal purposes so should only be taken in times of illness. Plus he said, it makes you smell. In the old shala which would fit only 12-15 students at a time, this was more cause for concern. So, when he was helping students drop back into backbends, he’d tell them,
“If you eat garlic, I drop you in backbending”.
Led Class language:
• In a Led class, you have to follow Sharath’s count. If people go too quickly, he’ll scold you with,
“Why you hurry? Don’t hurry”.
• In a one-legged standing pose, people who lose their balance and start hopping around will hear,
”No dancing”.
• There’s a pose where you’re practically up in a little ball rolling around in a full circle. Since people are packed so closely together, they will inevitably bump into each other and Sharath’s regular word of caution is,
“No head-butting”.
• At the end of the sequence, there’s a killer-pose where you sit cross-legged in lotus position and press down onto your hands, lifting your butt and legs off the ground. He’ll count from 1 to 10, VERY slowly. It’s tiring and not everyone can hold themselves up for the full ten counts. Sharath loves to tease us in this pose,
“Lift up. No cheating. Lift up! Not enough chapati (or sometimes, Too much chapati”.
• If people are moaning / groaning in a pose, you’ll get a not very sympathetic,
“No crying”.
• At the end of the class, he’ll always send us off with,
“Thank you very much. You go home, take rest”.
I think if anyone wrote a comprehensive guide on ‘How to Mysore’, they should include a section on Sharath English. It’d make life a lot smoother for everyone.
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