The inside track from Time Out’s international editors
In the current economic climate, you might think there’s not much to laugh about. But Indians are chuckling their chi back into shape. Dr Madan Kataria, a Mumbai doctor, started the first laughter yoga club (www.laughteryoga.org) in 1995 and today claims to have more than 20,000 clubs across the world. The concept is simple: take a group of strangers or friends, find a quiet spot, and bring on the giggles– forced or natural. ‘Our bodies can’t differentiate between real and faked laughter,’ says Kataria. ‘There is a connectionbetween breathing and laughing; we fall sick because we don’t breathe correctly.
It’s about health, not comedy.’ At the session we attended (at an unfunny 6.40am) we learnt the ‘sky laugh’ (arms stretched skywards), the ‘argument laugh’ (arguing with the group while laughing) and the ‘lotus laugh’ (two concentric circles of gigglers). There were no major health improvements, but the euphoric feeling survived the gridlocked crawl to the office, which in Delhi is hysterical. Radhika Arora, Time Out Delhi (www.timeoutdelhi.net)
