Yoga is marketed as an exercise in narcissism, but it’s the very opposite. That’s why I am so glad to support Yoga Gives Back, as it is the public practice of a very essential part of Yoga, namely disrupting systemic harm to make room for people. And I am especially excited about its focus on India, from where we learn about Yoga, and for helping, and for focusing on creating sustainable lives for India’s women and children.
Dr. Shyam Ranganathan (MA South Asian Studies, MA and PhD Philosophy) is a field-changing researcher, scholar, author, and teacher of philosophy, and an expert in the neglected traditions of Indian moral philosophy, which covers practical questions of how to live, what to aim for, and what we should value—including Yoga.
Dr. Ranganathan is a trained scholar and researcher of philosophy and is author, editor and translator of over 50 peer reviewed, scholarly works (including Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy MLBD 2008 and 2017; the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Ethics 2017; and Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation, Routledge 2018). A specialist in translation, having written his PhD dissertation on the topic of how we can understand texts without projecting our beliefs onto them, Dr. Ranganathan translated Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (Penguin 2008).
After over 20000 teaching hours and 3000 students, in 2019 , Dr. Ranganathan founded Yoga Philosophy (YACEP and CYA-RYSGOLD), a scholar practitioner initiative, to bring anti-colonial, anti-Eurocentric, research based knowledge about Yoga and Philosophy to practitioners. Shyam is a E-RYT-500 and CYA-RYT Gold. He is a member of the Department of Philosophy, and York Center for Asian Research, York University, Toronto.
