Thinking about visiting Mumbai? Here’s yet another reason — the Mumbai laughter clubs.
Mumbai is a busy, busy city. With a population of about 19 million souls, this tropical metropolitan area on the Arabian Sea is the fourth largest urban area in the world. Mumbai is the commercial, shipping and financial hub of India, a multicultural, multilingual city that is the home of Bollywood, the thriving Indian film and television industry. You might forgive residents of Mumbai for being a little stressed out.
But there is a solution for stress. And Mumbai owes it to Dr. Madan Kataria. The solution is laughter.
In the mid 1990’s, Dr. Kataria was researching the scientific literature that demonstrates that laughter aids in healing both mind and body. It occurred to the good doctor to start a laughter club. He sought participants by visiting a Mumbai park. Rather than engaging professional comedians, the few participants in the laughter clubs stood in a circle and told each other jokes. But then they ran out of jokes, so Dr. Kataria used his creativity to devise new ways of encouraging laughter. In doing so, he developed laughter yoga, a process that incorporates traditional yoga poses, yoga breathing and group laughter exercises that don’t depend on jokes or comedy routines. Dr. Kataria has continued to encourage laughter as a positive influence on physical, mental and spiritual well-being. And Mumbai is known as the birthplace of laughter yoga.
In a large and diverse city, the creation of laughter yoga is a charming slice of life.
Mumbai is a multilingual city in a multilingual country. The three most common languages spoken in Mumbai are Hindi, Marathi and English. Hindi is the official language of India and almost everyone in India can speak it, at least a little. So if you are visiting Mumbai or anywhere else in India, and you want to speak directly to the residents there, Hindi is the best language to learn.
Do you want to know how to learn Hindi? You can learn Hindi like a rocket with Rocket Hindi.
Speaking of Bollywood, have a look at these videos:
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coincidence, part one – l_r_13_edit. love and rockets, #13 by jaime and beto hernandez. by coincidence, the creator of the above publication came up to me when i was 14 years old and told me i reminded him of a character named maggie from a comic book called …
