Neal Pollack published an utterly sexist post on Salon.com about his experience at a yoga class above his level, involving a talk on ethics. During the talk on ethics, he threw a temper-tantrum because he thought the yoga instructor was dumb and brainwashed. This is how he described her:

You've had many yoga instructors who've looked like her, except that she was hotter by a degree of ten.*

Why does Neal Pollack think the yoga teacher's rating as a sex object is the important detail for the readers' understanding of this interaction? His weblog post about her, which he chose to title Die, smug yoga teacher, die, doesn't offer many hints.

Her "hotness" was mentioned just once more in the post (which is only an excerpt from, regrettably, an entire book Neal Pollack decided to write on yoga, fart jokes, and gender dynamics), in the context of her teaching assistants:

[F]or the love of Krishna, if you're a sexy Manhattan broad at the height of your powers, don't pawn your extra vinyasas off on underlings!

Those "underlings," as Neal Pollack is sure you are wondering, “looked kind of like massage therapists” to him.

Shorter** Neal Pollack:

I got stoned, went to a yoga class, stared at the yoga teacher's tits, and found her intellectually lacking. To counter her anti-intellectualism, I yelled bullshit and stormed out. After engaging in self-examination for about six months, I realized that yoga teacher was a smug, preachy bitch.

* I think Neal Pollack meant a factor of ten.

** The ‘Shorter’ concept was created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. I stole the concept from Roy Edroso. This is my first attempt.

Update: a review of Neal Pollack's book, Stretch.

India, home to some of humanity's oldest medicinal knowledge, recently got an unwanted education in modern western patent laws. In 1995, the US Patent Office awarded a patent to the University of Mississippi for the use of Turmeric to treat wounds.

Turmeric has been used by Indian healers, in the exact method patented, for centuries. After the patent, treating a wound with Turmeric briefly became a violation of US patent law. The modern intellectual property framework took a centuries-old medicinal tradition and made it property, but not India's property.

Luckily, India learns fast. Under the government's direction, large numbers of Indian scholars worked to create a database of indigenous knowledge to help challenge patents of this sort. The database, known as the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, includes information on many aspects of Indian culture that go far beyond medicine. The database contains information on all manner of Indian knowledge potentially at risk of privatization. And the threat is real: even yoga positions -- ancient methods of stretching and breathing -- have been copyrighted by private entities in the US.

Rather than embracing the US model and claim Indian copyrights and patents on Indian knowledge, the government is sharing this knowledge with the world. I think Prithviraj Chavan, the minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office, summed it up rather nicely:

We have translated this into five languages and put it in the public domain. We are more than willing to share this knowledge with scholars but pharmaceutical companies won’t be able to claim patents on this.

The medicinal knowledge is safely returned to the public domain -- where it has existed for centuries -- and this new database will (hopefully) keep it there. Intellectual property law in the US has reached a point of insanity and kudos to the Indian government for not allowing their culture's knowledge to be privatized.