AT 8.30 o�clock in the morning in a quiet, leafy bylane in Pune�s Shivaji Nagar, B. K. S. Iyengar, the world�s greatest practitioner of yoga, makes a quick breakfast of a half-cup of Southern coffee and prepares to take his first class of the day. That�s all he will have to sustain himself until lunch time: a half-cuf of coffee. After which he will put his 84-year-old body through the most awesome series of physical exercises and contortions meant to make man physically, mentally and even spiritually fit. His daughter Geeta, who is fussing about the kitchen, tells me that her father woke up at 4.30 a.m. to do an hour-and-half of pranayama. This is a form of breath control that steadies the mind and brings calmness to the body. Iyengar begins his day with this every morning. The coffee comes later.

The house is part of the world renowned Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute on Harekrishna Mandir Road, Pune 411 016. It is a simple, two-storeyed structure outside which, in a small courtyard, stands a marble statue of Iyengar in his favourite yoga pose, the Natavajasana. The institute is across the home. It is a three-storeyed, pagoda-like building of unique architectural design. It is semicircular and like a pyramid in the front and vertically segmented and with a flat, triangular surface at the rear. A shrine for Hanuman, Lord of the Breath, sits proudly on the top of the building. Hanuman is the embodiment of strength and stability, intellect and courage, celibacy and humility. Students who enter the yoga institute are inspired to absorb some of Hanuman�s virtues.

The presiding deity, though, at the institute is the sage Patanjali, who codified yoga, and before whose statue everybody, including Iyengar, bows at the start of the day. Patanjali�s blessings are invoked with a short prayer. I drink coffee with Iyengar, a full cup, not half, though while driving down to Pune from Bombay in the early morning, I had already made a hearty breakfast along the way. I refrain from telling the great yoga master this. The coffee is South Indian, a Madras filter variety, dark and strong. I am not surprised that Iyengar is fond of it.

He comes from Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, just outside Madras city, where Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. And the favourite drink there is coffee. Now he tilts his head back and pours the last of the brew down his throat. Then we walk across to the institute, Iyengar dressed in a white lungi and kurta and carrying a small stop-watch.

At this hour of the morning, an advanced batch of students is practising asanas on the first floor. I am astonished to find that most of them are foreigners. But that�s probably because Iyengar and yoga are synonymous everywhere in the world. He has been all over, except China and South America, giving demonstrations, teaching yoga and setting up institutes. And today there are about 300 Iyengar Yoga Centres globally, in which some 6,000 teachers give instructions to about 20 million students. Despite which there are still hundreds of foreigners who like to come to Pune and learn yoga directly from the great Iyengar himself. He pauses for a moment to watch these students and then cuts a path through them, reminding me of Moses walking through the Red Sea.

This is his routine every day. He works out at the institute by himself, dressed in a pair of black trunks, practising yoga asanas that he perfected 50 years ago over and over again. While the foreign students sit and gape. When he does something that is particularly breath-taking and difficult, they break into applause and then reach for their cameras and handycams to shoot Iyengar in the yoga pose. The guru is unaffected by this. He pushes himself higher and harder, one eye on the stop-watch that is ticking away, unmindful of his advancing years. Occasionally he breaks off to correct a student, or goes to help somebody attempting the headstand, walking in short, jerky steps. And then it is 12.30 and he stops, stretches himself on the floor for half-an-hour of pranayama, and gets up refreshed and rejuvenated, looking 50. It is time for lunch.

My colleague Mark Manuel and I are at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute just for this. We want to know what makes Iyengar tick. What kind of food keeps him alive, energetic, supple and peaceful at his age. And we want to know whether the great yoga teacher can himself cook. At the dining table in his home, where daughter Geeta and grandchildren Abhijata and Hareeth Sridhar are laying out the lunch, Iyengar gives a toothy grin at my question. �Can I cook,� he asks in amusement. �Of course I can. When my wife was alive and the children were small, I used to cook on �those� days when she could not enter the kitchen.� Iyengar gives me a knowing look. By which I understand he means when his wife was going through her period.

Geeta takes up the story. �He used to make simple food. A dal and rice, some sambar and rasam, a few vegetables. Maybe a payasam, too. He has excellent tastebuds. Even today, he can identify different spices just by taste. If there�s anything less or more in a dish, he can tell immediately. When he first started going abroad, he had problems with food. There was nothing Indian. And there was nothing vegetarian. Also it was costly to eat at restaurants. Often he survived just on coffee and bread. Then he started carrying rice and pulses and cooked his own meals when he travelled. Now his students have gotten wise, they cook for him. Plus, there are Indian restaurants all over the world. He still doesn�t care for foreign foods and will not eat many. If he cannot get Indian vegetarian meals abroad, he will have bread and butter, cottage cheese, fruit.�

Iyengar, who was making short work of the lunch being dished out by his granddaughter, paused to wipe his mouth before saying: �The only vegetarian food I could get abroad for a long time was fried potatoes and steamed carrots. And you can�t eat that all the time. Now my students give me home-cooked meals.� He believes food should be eaten with reverence. The body is a mould prepared by the mind to carry out the activities of the mind. The foods that we eat to build both the body and the mind should therefore be pure, wholesome and nutritious. A light diet is the best.

Iyengar is aware of all the various schools of thought on yoga, vegetarianism and diet, and how simple vegetarian food is considered essential to supply the body with energy while maintaining purity of the mind. He says: �My problem is that people are all born differently. The authors of books on yoga and diet do not know what their readers like. They have no idea about their tastes, their emotions, their allergies. Some people can digest milk, some cannot. But still, I recommend vegetarian food. All vegetables are healthy. They are exposed to the five elements, to the air, earth, water, fire and wind. We, too, are made up of the elements. And besides, I think being a vegetarian causes least injury to any living thing.�

He firmly believes that animals in the slaughter house, by instinct, know when they are going to get killed. And they naturally become emotionally disturbed. �The blood quality of such an agitated animal is unhealthy. What kind of meat are we eating? Our mental stability, our intellectual clarity, depends on the right kind of food. I like eating simple food, dal-chawal and sabzi-roti every day. No onions and no garlic. These things don�t suit me. I�m not saying I have absolutely bland food. But it�s not too spicy as well. I like having a dessert with every meal. No chocolates and ice-creams and things like that! But South Indian delicacies like payasam, sakhara pongal, mysore pak, shrikhand, sheera. And I like having coffee and honey with my meals.� He produces a jar of El Qvexigal Honey from Spain that some student has given him to show me. Coffee is the strongest beverage Iyengar will drink. He avoids soft drinks and to even discuss alcohol is taboo!

There is one more thing about B. K. S. Iyengar that I would like to mention that struck me as being pretty amazing about him. His worldwide popularity has been achieved not just because he is a great yoga instructor, but also because he is an astonishing healer. People come to him from far and wide for cures to all kinds of muscular and exoskeleton problems. �The cure strikes me while I put them through asanas,� he explains. �I can trace problems just by looking at a person. It is a science of the eye. An instinctive nature develops into instinct.� Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evening, Iyengar conducts yoga classes for people with medical problems. His student-patients come with histories of heart disease, digestive problems, spinal aches and slip disc, epileptic disorders and diabetes. Iyengar cures them all. �The recovery rate is good. In fact, I have had to close admission to this class,� he says. �When all other cures fail, people say, �Go to Iyengar�.� And who were the most famous people who came to him when everything else failed? �Sachin Tendulkar and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But the were not interested in yoga.�