India celebrates its first International Yoga Day today. PHOTO: Members of the Navy performing Yoga at sea.

On Sunday morning, the Indian capital New Delhi’s broadest and grandest avenue, Rajpath, will be covered in a sea of yoga mats, with some 35,000 people expected to indulge in mass physical contortions to mark the first International Day of Yoga—a pet initiative of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He pitched the idea to the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in his maiden speech at the annual diplomatic confab in September. A formal UNGA resolution to establish an international yoga day was passed in December, with more than 170 countries co-sponsoring the move. Modi’s government has since gone all out to promote the first yoga day, calling its diplomatic corps into service to plan events in more than 190 countries.

The Modi government is attempting to set two world records, including the largest yoga lesson (the current record was set in India in 2005, when nearly 30,000 students from more than 360 schools participated in a yoga session in the central Indian city of Gwalior). It also wants to set a record for the number of nationalities involved in a single yoga lesson, a category it hopes to pioneer.

Yoga has evolved and how – specially in going from rustic rib-cracking physical contortions to one-hour sessions of simpler movements in pleasant settings (think AC). Not to forget the Western community thanking India for this gift of a holistic system. Curious about how it traveled there? Then this may be the piece for you, courtesy William Dalrymple. This book, too. Now that its origin, history and current state have been discussed, it’s imperative that we look at aspects of Yoga that are not discussed often.

Let’s start with the spirituality of it. And this autobiographical piece of writing in The Scroll lends good perspective.

For me personally, the highest value of studying yoga in India was being pushed out of my comfort zone and getting a chance to take a look at my whole value system afresh. Maybe we need to leave our cosy world for a moment to be able to truly understand the cultural and religious context in which yoga was born, and really experience the modest and disciplined way of life that yoga traditionally meant. And this definitely doesn’t have much in common with detox green juices and perfect bodies in branded yoga pants posing in graceful, breathtaking backbends, which in a way was my perception of yoga-lifestyle before that. More.

Now looking at how the pliable definition of spirituality has been bent (no, we are not punning on any Yoga move here), loose talk about Yoga falling into the territory of Hinduism has Muslims standing their ground, with statement that “the Muslim community would be shooting itself in the foot if it falls into the trap of seeing yoga as a religious practice instead of a health-providing one.”

So over huffing, panting, bending, and what not for a world record, how about returning to the very roots of Yoga?