Morning Walks and Expanding Conversations

Morning walks are strange little universities.

You set out imagining you are merely exercising your legs, but often return enriched by unexpected conversations on yoga, spirituality, politics, healing sciences, crowd psychology, and occasionally even real estate economics.

After my walk today, I was joined by a walkmate who appears only twice a week. He is also a yoga teacher and carries within him the sincere missionary zeal of someone convinced that the world can still be improved through stretching, breathing, and disciplined posture.

He has this remarkable habit of inducting unsuspecting bystanders into yoga sessions. I had once briefly become one of his reluctant disciples. Usually exhausted after my jog, I would sit down quietly to recover, only for him to arrive with such infectious enthusiasm that refusing participation began to feel morally questionable. Soon, what started as “just a few stretches” would evolve into a full thirty-minute gathering involving eight to ten people, ending in collective pranayam performed with the seriousness of a constitutional ceremony.

My eventual escape from this arrangement came courtesy of another elderly walkmate who once dramatically declared that the very purpose of his visit to the lake was our conversations, not to watch me disappear for half an hour into yogic contortions while my stubborn body struggled unsuccessfully to imitate seasoned practitioners. His emotional blackmail provided the perfect moral justification for my retirement from post-jog yoga.

Today, however, there were only two of us at the bench initially, later joined by another enthusiastic supporter of yoga.

During the conversation, the gentleman who had joined us later, revealed that he had injured his ribs during a recent trip to Kashi. Curious, I asked how. He explained that while attempting to touch a sacred stone, two equally determined devotees from behind had collapsed onto him in their own spiritual urgency.

At that moment, I silently congratulated myself for possessing one lifelong benchmark for survival: I avoid any place where more than four people occupy a square metre. It has spared me both religious enlightenment and rib injuries.

What fascinated me was that he narrated the entire episode with unmistakable pride. Apparently, on two earlier visits he had failed to touch the stone because public access was restricted to a single hour between 4 and 5 a.m. This time he finally succeeded, though at some physical cost.

The yoga teacher immediately assumed command of the situation and prescribed a series of bending and stretching exercises. The injured man performed them with greater agility than the instructor himself, while simultaneously conveying that he was already well versed in such matters and was merely allowing nature sufficient time to complete formalities.

Soon the discussion moved naturally from physiotherapy to metaphysics.

The yoga teacher explained that the mind possesses healing powers. Just as a lens can focus sunlight strongly enough to burn paper through convergence of rays, he said, the mind too can focus upon a diseased part of the body and heal it. He then extended the theory further: if the mind could focus upon another person’s body, even distant healing became possible.

I listened with the diplomatic silence of a student who neither fully understands the lecture nor wishes to fail the examination.

Soon the third walkmate departed, leaving just the yoga teacher and me. He then casually mentioned that he had registered to attend a major celebration where the Honourable Prime Minister was expected to appear. The occasion, he added, was the 70th birthday celebration of a Godman.

At this point, my internal alarm system activated gently.

I have always possessed an instinctive discomfort around Godmen, especially those commanding extraordinary influence, wealth, or land holdings. But before I could redirect the discussion toward safer territory like cholesterol or rainfall, he asked whether I had ever visited the Ashram. I admitted that I had once accompanied someone from outside the state who was interested in seeing it.

That opened the floodgates.

He described a person who had stayed there for ten days to recover from an ailment, paying ₹1.15 lakhs for accommodation, food, and oil massages. My mind, tragically conditioned toward arithmetic rather than spirituality, instantly divided the amount and calculated the daily tariff.

He then informed me that the larger campus and its associated facilities had expanded enormously over the years, to the point where internal bus tours had now become necessary.

At this stage, my brain had quietly withdrawn from active participation and moved into passive listening mode.

He returned to describing the scale of the celebrations and the large number of sevaks involved. I generally avoid conversations about either politics or Godmen because both subjects possess an alarming tendency to expand rapidly beyond reasonable limits.

Finally, unable to absorb further unsolicited spiritual infrastructure data, I confessed gently:

“I become nervous around spiritual leaders whose beard, and land holdings, grow simultaneously.”

He probably realised by then that he had already dished out far more for my consumption than I could reasonably chew that morning, and simply smiled.

To his credit, he then attempted a graceful retreat by listing several spiritual organisations engaged in charitable work,  free meals, education, relief activities, and the like. I nodded politely, partly because I had not heard of many of them, and partly because both of us were now searching for a dignified closing point to a conversation that had wandered much farther than either of us had originally anticipated.

Morning walks, after all, are rarely just about walking.

What fascinates me most about these morning encounters is not whether one agrees or disagrees with the people involved. It is the ease with which ordinary human conversations drift across subjects that civilisation itself has argued over for centuries — health, faith, healing, politics, belief, money, and meaning — all before sunrise and usually beside a walking track.

Perhaps that is why morning walks feel less like exercise and more like attending an open university without a syllabus, where every bench carries a different faculty and every conversation threatens to become a thesis.

Stories, not instructions. Experiences, not advice—medical or otherwise. Data, only what the internet quietly gathers anyway. Proceed with equal parts curiosity and common sense.