‘If you laugh on the first floor, you should be able to hear it on the seventh floor,’ says Mr Kuvavala. ‘Try to feel the energy – you’ll burn off calories.’ I’d never really equated laughter with losing weight before, but the almost entirely thin and slender collection of Indians standing in a circle on the beach looked to be a pretty good testament to the powers of sniggering your way to slimness.
I was halfway through my first laughter yoga session and my teacher was clearly not yet completely convinced by my devotion to the cause. The gentle reprimand of my giggling strength didn’t last long, thankfully. Turning back to the group Mr Kuvavala had another idea in store for us. ‘Now everybody!’ he bellowed with another quite impossibly wide grin spread across his face. ‘Let’s start picking flies out of a bowl of lassi!’
Laughter yoga clubs have sprung up throughout India since their modest origins in the mid 1990s. Madan Kataria, a doctor who had been writing about the possibility of curing disease through laughter, decided to experiment with the perceived everyday health benefits himself. With four complete strangers as his recruits, they stood in a park in Lokhandwala, his home suburb of Mumbai at dawn and told each other jokes. Impressed at the response, within days there were dozens of people joining them for this totally free al fresco stand-up comedy collective.
Soon Kataria realised he was facing a problem he hadn’t reckoned on: an increasing number of the female congregation were becoming upset at the bawdy nature of some of the jokes being told. Kataria had a novel solution. He decided to dispense with the jokes altogether, substituting them with physical games. He called it ‘laughter for no reason’ (the title of the manifesto of his art that he would later write) and the games the group played involved such innocent playfulness as pretending to be aeroplanes, kicking imaginary footballs and tickling each other.
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