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B.K.S. Iyengar would have been 97 on Monday, and Google honoured him on the home page of globalization. The guru, rendered in\u00a0cartoon avatar, doodled through pigeon, triangle, and headstand twists. The illustrator gave him the silver mane of his elder years, but also the litheness of his youth.<\/p>\n
My first reaction was cozy. \u201cGoogle\u201d can still be a fun\u00a0word, and who doesn’t love the doodle?\u00a0The white page implies a wintry playground, and the brown stick figure sweeps\u00a0angels into the snow of search-engine possibility.<\/p>\n
For a moment, I felt a warm sigh roll through me: \u201cThe practice is truly for everyone. Yoga has come of age.\u201d<\/p>\n
But what age?<\/p>\n
An age in which it makes perfect sense for techno-capitalism to co-opt yoga as its go-to\u00a0religion. In which a virtual power\u00a0aligns with an embodied practice to foreshadow its plans\u00a0to reach into our very breath and cells with its web-crawlers.<\/p>\n
It’s an age in which the individual body, detached from solid social systems and social contracts, predictable employment and a reliable environment, stands alone in pixelated, timeless space. To survive, it must mirror the hyper-flexibility of borderless flows of money and data.<\/p>\n
An age in which seeking is conflated with searching. In which self-inquiry is performed through the infinite postures of consumer choice. In which racial and class identity is parodied by appeals to brand loyalty.<\/p>\n
An age in which public health is the burden of personal responsibility, and mindfulness elides into modes of surveillance that boost productivity.<\/p>\n
An age in which everything is personal, but nothing is private.<\/p>\n
Most importantly, the Guru Google doodle appears in an age of control, in which the bodymind and its desires are provoked, served, and monitored by a universalized power. Call it capital, call it prana. <\/em>Whatever it is, it\u00a0flows\u00a0over\u00a0boundaries, and accumulates virtue in the flesh of the disciplined. Through\u00a0stock tickers and\u00a0body scans, it\u00a0provides constant tracking.<\/p>\n Is\u00a0the\u00a0desire to control nature, vitality, and flesh the sacred thread that ties\u00a0Mr. Iyengar to\u00a0the priests\u00a0of the digital economy?<\/p>\n Iyengar was a coder. He wrote a precise but ever-changing flow\u00a0of if\/then\/goto prompts and cues into the wetware\u00a0of his students. His operating system is perhaps primarily notable for its totality<\/em>. He turned each skeleton into a logic-tree of divine performance, each cell into a microchip of efficiency. Each breath warms or cools the capacitors of life through the 1’s and 0’s of inhale and exhale. The mind tracks every detail of the body\u00a0with ritual obsession, chanted out of a\u00a0distant past. His yoga is conceived of as a unity between thought\u00a0and action, brokered by instantaneous communication.<\/p>\n Google controls through the totalizing illusion of choice, plus\u00a0the collection of our responses to that illusion, fed back to us in the form of more choices. You\u2019ll be able to choose the colour of your self-driving car, but can you choose to have no destination? You have to navigate somewhere.<\/p>\n For his part, Mr. Iyengar also inspired his students to sublime moments of choiceless choice. Like Google’s, his\u00a0algorithm orders chaos and banishes boredom through attention to the minutest detail.<\/p>\n Globalized postural yoga and the high-tech world are entrepreneurial and cosmopolitan. They are\u00a0endlessly positive\u00a0explorations of patterns that erase as much as they create. Both\u00a0blend and blur\u00a0cultures and histories in the service of progress and individualist mastery.<\/p>\n Both\u00a0offer personal space, and then\u00a0watch you perform. Note that your\u00a0iPhone has the\u00a0same\u00a0proportions\u00a0as your yoga mat. In 1990, we used to say we could “find ourselves\u00a0on our\u00a0mats”. In 2015, you can look for\u00a0yourself on your mat with your phone beside you, beaming your searching performance\u00a0to periscope. Is the body easier to find\u00a0through its images?<\/p>\n There are other symmetries.<\/p>\n In June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood at the top of\u00a0New Delhi’s Rajpath Boulevard to lead 38,000 people in government-issued uniforms through the Common Yoga Protocol on International Yoga Day. Then, in September, he toured the headquarters of Facebook, Amazon, and Google, leading a mainly-Indian diaspora in salutes to the digital age.<\/p>\n