This morning we are going to Yoga Cure to speak meet with Rooma and Shibnath De. Rooma is Buddha Bose's daughter and together they run Yoga Cure. We aren't sure what to expect after getting shunned a couple days ago, but we have been unknowingly careless with their family matters. Today we are hoping they will talk to us.

Rooma and Shibnath are gracious hosts. We discuss the manuscript and they tell us many stories about the past including BC Ghosh, Buddha Bose, Bose's sons Ashok and Arun, Yogananda, and Bikram. I will write more about the specifics at a later date.

After the meeting we head to the book district in search of old, rare and out of print books that are only available in Kolkata. I find a beat up, ancient copy of Yoga Hygiene Simplified by Shri Yogendra, another translation of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, and a translation of the Rg Veda among many other things.

Jerome is looking for copies of an old pamphlet the BC Ghosh edited called Byayam, so we scour the side streets and rare book dealers. Down one of the streets we stumble across a book stand that is displaying this poster from Das' school. The poster is yoga asanas, 26 of them, performed by girls. The instruction is in Bengali. They also have a similar poster of boys and one of boys and girls mixed. I get all three. Together they cost about 90 cents.

We return to the hotel to eat and shower, then head to the Howrah train station across the Ganges. Our train to Ranchi leaves at 10:30pm and will arrive at 7:30 tomorrow morning.

To recover from a long day yesterday that was more like 3 days, we stay around the hotel in the morning. Sleeping late is impossible because of jet lag, but we bathe, do some asana and pranayama practice and eat on the terrace. The food at the hotel is quite good.

We head to downtown Kolkata to arrange for train tickets for tomorrow's journey to Ranchi. The ticket office is in the business district, crowded with street vendors and businessmen. We go to the office for foreigners as it is supposedly much faster than the one for Indians.

We get fresh green coconuts from a street vendor, drinking the water through a straw and then scooping out the flesh to eat. We also get a pomegranate and eat it while overlooking the Ganges.

We wait two hours for them to call our number at the ticket office. Then they tell us we should just go to the regular office where there is no line. So we leave and go around the corner. There are no lines, but the building smells like an outhouse. The bureaucracy is ridiculous, the computers are from the 80s, and communication seems way too hard.

We visit the Ghosh Yoga College and ask Muktamala a few questions. The walls are covered with photographs of Biswanath doing strongman feats and standing next to movie stars. There is one photo of Bose, none of Tony. Many advanced postures are on the wall, performed by Prem Sundar Das.

We visit 4 Garpur Rd., Bishnu and Yogananda's childhood home. A small tour of the home takes us to Yogananda's bedroom and meditation room. We are accompanied by an old man and his family, devotees of Yogananda. His devotion is moving even though I feel nothing from my experience at the home.

To end the day we follow some narrow alleys to the door of Ironman Nilmoni Das' place. It is run by Nilmoni's son Swapan Kumar Das. They lift weights and practice yoga for general health and fitness. They have been publishing books and charts of exercises for decades. These charts are a big part of the reason why athletes would come to Kolkata to train, even if it was with someone like BC Ghosh.

Swapan Kumar tells us many stories of Ghosh and the yoga culture of the 50s through today. He also has charts that detail 26 yoga asanas. They are unmistakably similar to Bikram's 26, though far from identical.

Das, along with everyone else we have talked to, says that Bikram was a weight lifter not a yogi. He is kind, saying that we should talk about the good in people, not their dark sides.

Our first day in Kolkata began at 1am when we arrived at the airport. We waited a little while to take a taxi into the city around dawn, asking the cab driver to stop at Yogananda's house and the Ghosh Yoga College before taking us to the hotel.

After a stroll through the neighborhood to get our bearings, we have breakfast at the hotel at about 8am. Already we feel exhausted and disoriented but the day is just beginning.

We meet with Chitralekha and Pavitra. Chitralekha was married to Buddha Bose's oldest son Ashok. She also taught yoga to the women at Yoga Cure for awhile in the 70s. Pavitra is her son, one of the grandsons of Buddha Bose. We discuss many things. At one point Chitralekha says "Ghosh didn't do yoga." He focused solely on bodybuilding. When elaborating what she thought about the surfacing of Bose's complete album and the potential of more people knowing about his yoga, she said that above anything else Bose was "gentle." He rarely touched or adjusted anyone.

We head over to the Indian National Library where we locate a copy of Bose's book Holy Kailas. He wrote it about his journeys through the holy mountains of India. In the introduction he talks about his plane crash, the subsequent back brace he was required to wear, and his surrender to God.

The day ends with a trip to Yoga Cure. We hope to meet and discuss the album with Rooma De, Bose's daughter who currently runs the school and carries the torch for Bose yoga. We are met at the gate by Avrakesh, her son, a grandson of Buddha. He wastes very little time in telling us that they are not interested in the album and swiftly brushes us from the premesis. Jerome asks "So you don't want to see Buddha Bose's album?" Avrakesh replies, "It is not up to me, but we have no interest in it at this time." We leave, baffled.

In a few minutes I will set out for Kolkata, India, the birthplace of Ghosh Yoga. It is where Bishnu Charan Ghosh lived for much of his life and where he founded his yoga school.

A lot of change happened in yoga and physical culture in India in the 1930s. On this trip we hope to unravel some of the threads that have led us to where we are now.

I will try to update here as much as I can, but I don't know what to expect from our experiences or internet availability. Needless to say when I return I will post a lot of information about the trip.

I must be careful to not let study overtake actual practice. The experience of practice is the true path of yoga. Study can act as a guide and a supplement, but at no point should it replace practice.

“The vedas say that true knowledge can only reveal itself to you
you cannot reach that state through just reading and studying”
-From Yoga Makaranda by Krishnamacharya