#MeToo: Yoga Students Create Comic Strip To Highlight Sexual Harassment in Centre, Find the Centre Co-opting It

The Practice Room (TPR), a prominent and popular yoga centre in Bengaluru has been called out for allegations of sexual harassment against one of its co-founders, Mohan Polamar.

Although the sexual harassment allegations were levelled back in May 2018, the issue gained traction on Sunday, November 4, after the other cofounder of the centre, and Mohan’s wife, Jaya, shared a comic strip created by the women who had experienced the inappropriate behaviour as a “do’s and don’ts guide” for yoga teachers to follow.

Speaking to NewsCentral24x7, while requesting anonymity, a person who had complained against Mohan shared how she got to know about the misgivings brought about by Mohan’s behaviour and how she and her fellow yoga students took it upon themselves to address the issue.

“I was a student of TPR for about three years. In May, I had random conversation with other fellow students about these allegations against Mohan,” she said. “The studio was closed in May for summer vacations and no classes were going on but suddenly people started talking about this, that there were some allegations. The people did not know who was actually affected but that the person who was actually affected and who had complained was asked to leave after making the complaint.”

She said that she had reached out to one of the four assistant yoga teachers who were in the employment of TPR. She stated that while the person with whom she had spoken had downplayed the incident as a personal fall-out between the co-founder and the ex-student, she thought that the downplaying was purposeful.

“It sounded to me that something bad had happened and these people (Jaya and Mohan) had tried to cover it up and now they were doing some kind of victim blaming by calling her (the ex-student) unstable and angry, and that she had gone out and lied to people about this,” she said.

In July, she noted, a few of her classmates who knew the ex-student personally reached out to her. She said that her classmates had said that they had received written testimonials from several other students who had complained about Mohan’s behaviour. She added, “I read the testimonials and I was quite shocked to see what they said. They were quite different from what Jaya and Mohan were telling their assistant teachers and the other people.”

She stated that she and her classmates wanted to hold a formal meeting wherein the co-founders could present their side of the story. “We wanted them to tell us what they thought, why they had behaved the way they had and why things had transpired the way they had,” she said, but added that the meeting had been “fairly disturbing.”

“There were about ten students in the meeting, it was polite and civilised as it was emotional subject,” she observed of the meeting held in July. “But, we were belittled and we were told that you guys are reacting too much, this was mob mentality and none of this was real. We were quite upset because they did not show any concern or respect in the complaints and neither did they express any interest in wanting to create a safe place in TPR.”

Talking about the outcome of the meeting, she said that Mohan was asked to step down as a teacher in the centre for a year and that an Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) would be set up by the centre. She also said that she and four other students quit the centre immediately after the meeting as they did not feel comfortable continuing in that environment.

However, in September she found out that while the ICC had been set up, Mohan was back in the centre after just a month-long absence. “He was not teaching per se but he was handling props and helping people,” she said, adding that she and a few other students wrote a formal complaint to the ICC in which they raised the subject of Mohan rejoining the centre. “We wrote the complaint last Monday (October 29) and since that complaint went out, we have found out that Mohan is back, teaching again,” she said.

Here’s a story about a sexual harasser, Mohan Polamar, who is also a yoga teacher. Oh the access.

This is the couple who runs The Practice Room in Wheeler Road, Bangalore.

The women who he harassed got together and created this comic pic.twitter.com/JnPXMrOLNO

— Sandhya Menon (@TheRestlessQuil) November 4, 2018

Creating the comic strip was, then, a reaction to these recent developments. “The comic strip was a creative outlet for all of us to put our experience out there. (It was) something positive and a little light,” she said, adding that she was not among the five women who had created the light-hearted comic strip.

The comic strip had been shared by the 13 women who had lodged a formal complaint to the centre’s ICC yesterday on their social media platforms and WhatsApp groups. However, the irony came about when the well-intentioned comic strip was conveniently used by Jaya to pass along the members of TPR’s current yoga students.