Okay, to start with, I'd better explain that "Universal Yet Personal" is the title of the course we are doing at KYM.
So tonight we were meant to have a lecture at 6pm so we told Suresh to come at 7.15, but then it was cancelled. Claudia had a consultation at 6pm with one of our teachers, Shridharan, so we decided to leave the arrangements with Suresh for Claudia and walk back to the hotel with Les (photo above).
This became an exploration, as Les tried to find a new way back, a more (in his words) "scenic route". Scenic indeed, it gave us a look at street life in Chennai away from the bustling traffic (for a while), with sights (and smells) that can only be described as, welll, 'authentic'.
As we wandered along the backstreets, the light fading fast (and street lighting barely adequate to see the potholes beneath our feet) there were children playing with a cricket ball in the street, throwing it up in the air to each other and catching it.
As we approached the group, one of them took his eye off the ball - and was rewarded with a sound smack in the cojones from the flying cricket ball. We immediately felt his pain, and I turned to Les, Colin and Pedro saying, "You know, there's just something Universal about a smack in the nuts."
"Yeah," said Les, so quickly that a flash wouldn't have a look-in. "Universal. Yet personal."
I now have an intense desire, nay need, to go and work out a profound and meningful yoga story that I can tell to a class based on this incident. Something that starts with, "You know, yoga is like the crushing pain of a kick to the bollocks..."