While, India has been in a generous practice of sharing its age-old treasures of health care system with the world, the West has been in habit of twisting things around to make some Indian things sound a little too fancy and funny perhaps.
Recent in the row is an article titled ‘Proper Breathing Brings Better Health’, which was published in the popular American journal Scientific American. The article, that talks about benefits of proper breathing and how our body changes for the better if breathing is practiced correctly, has gone viral widely over the social media leaving the Indian community red faced.
The article when shared on Twitter described the benefits of ‘Cardiac Coherence Breathing’ which in simpler words is the Indian technique of Pranayama.
The tweet said, “Cardiac coherence breathing exercises can stabilize the heartbeat and have a powerful ability to dampen anxiety.”
The journal did mention Pranayam inside their article though. A para from the article read, ‘Recommendations for how to modulate breathing and influence health and mind appeared centuries ago as well. Pranayama (“breath retention”) yoga was the first doctrine to build a theory around respiratory control, holding that controlled breathing was a way to increase longevity.’
However, this renaming stunt did not go down well with many Indians. Soon after it went viral, Shashi Tharoor was quick to slam it. Taking to his Twitter account, Tharoor said, ‘Detailed description of the benefits of the 2500-year-old Indian technique of pranayama, dressed up in 21st c. scientific language as “cardiac coherence breathing”.
His tweet was followed by an array of response from other users who criticised the description: