Surprised! Astonished? Don’t they seem as different as chalk and cheese and North pole and South Pole or isn’t talking about cabaret in Yoga’s context akin to finding a polar bear in Africa.

One of my Aunts( an illustrious corporate executive’s wife) advised me to do a cabaret before starting Yoga when she came to know that I had a stiff body and hated doing Surya Namaskar( supposed to be warm up for yoga). Looking at my sheepish grin and somewhat dumfounded look, she even went on to demonstrate it while adding ,” The important thing is to get all your joints lose before a yoga session and nothing better than a cabaret of about three minutes to do that”. Being a yoga buff, she was probably right I thought. Looking at her twists and turns, I could not help but wonder how well she would have done in her youth. She is 63.

Next morning, I tried it out and found to my amusement that it was actually effective if you do it seriously. The body does loosen up. In fact I improvised on it. A cold water shower also tends to loosen up the body somewhat. So I started doing a cabaret at the shower and it really produced a double effect. One can even jog under the shower with the hands going up and down instead of forwards and backwards if one does not like doing a cabaret. That is a pretty good alternative. If you do proper Yoga after that it can make you feel fresh and energetic for the rest of the day. Yoga can be quite boring and from that perspective too, this was a good discovery.

One hears of bathroom singers and things like “ Dancing in the rain”. I never thought I would come so close to it and in this manner. Talk about the vagaries of existence.