| Titel: | The litigious yogi |
|---|---|
| Autor: | --- |
| Mediengruppe: | journal article |
| Herausgeber: | --- |
| Zeitschrift: | Economist |
| Jahr: | 2004 |
| Band: | 371 |
| Heft: | 8380 |
| Seiten: | 64 |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Abstract: | This article discusses how Bikram Choudhury wants to franchise his yoga classes worldwide. According to Patanjali, the great sage of yoga who lived in the second century BC, yoga is about bringing the mind to complete stillness and thus reaching liberation from mental delusions such as anger, egoism and greed. Bikram is to the yoga world what fast food is to the culinary world. Like B.K.S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois, two fellow Indians who are associated, respectively, with the gourmet schools, Bikram (www.bikramyoga.com) has found celebrity and wealth through yoga. The closest precedent was an attempt in 2000 by a teacher of Pilates--a popular fitness method invented in 1914 by a German prisoner-of-war, Joseph Pilates--to enforce the trademark "Pilates" against another studio that used the name. Bikram's licensing of his sequence, says Jim Harrison, a lawyer for OSYU, is thus less like selling the rights to a song and more like lecturing about the "Kama Sutra" and then trying to charge couples a fee every time they have sex in one of the positions. |