A session with Yoga Guru-Ji...

We’ve signed up to the local yoga classes held in the temple opposite our house. Three times a week we trot off for a session that always proves to be highly entertaining thanks to our teacher, Yoga Guru-Ji.

His name says it all. It conjures up the image of a mystical Gandalf like figure that levitates into the room in the perfect lotus position. You could not get further from the truth. He tends to arrive 10 minutes late, sporting a bushy moustache, 5 o’clock shadow and a bomber jacket over his kurta. In the meantime, one of our fellow classmates tends to take over. She’s sort of the Dot Cotton of our class, as they tend to be women in their 50s and insists on doing warm up exercises that involve rolling your eyes “clock” and then “anti-clock”.

The class is held in the courtyard of the temple which is beautiful, but extremely noisy. The prayer bell is rung throughout so Yoga Guru-Ji needs to shout fairly loudly. His technique tends to be a mixture of yoga and 80s jazzercise. His training must have involved a Rosemary Conley video at some point. We firstly start with a warm up of ‘sports marching’ that involves marching on the spot with coordinating hands to knees. Then when we do exercises on the floor. He insists they are done “spiritedly” which involves him either manoeuvring your arm into the right position using his vice like grip or flinging your body from side to side.

He likes to tell us which part of the body each posture improves. Apart from the third eye he’s always keen to tell us about the healing properties to our rectum, whilst burping loudly. We also do laughing yoga which I seem to be very proficient at, especially when he keeps telling me "Nikki-Ji cheating" when I fail to dislocate my body into the cobra pose.

He must have been a great fan of 80s films, as my favourite exercise involves some classic Karate Kid moves. We perform the Mr Miyagi ‘healing hands rub’ at the end of every session. After rubbing your hands together to warm your palms you then, um, rub yourself all over. I have no idea what the local prayer goers think, it must be very amusing for them to watch us. It’s all highly enjoyable, particularly as apart from getting a little bit bendier, it only cost us Rs200 (£2.66) a month and the whole class is done in mainly Hindi. You will be pleased to know that my language skills are improving so much, that I can tell you the word for rectum is exactly the same in Hindi as English...

Highlights: Reaping the benefits of the endless queuing for my resident’s permit and only paying Rs5 to get into Tughlaqabad Fort for our jolly day out picnic (we volunteers know how to put on a good spread), discovering ‘eat as much as you can sushi and drink as much Tiger beer’ special at a local posh restaurant for only Rs599 (a real treat on our budget, when 10 of us descended the waiting staff realised within 5 minutes we were there for the long haul and it was best to bring over buckets of beer... ), it’s February and it’s 26 degrees outside (‘nuff said!).