A Good Guffaw a Day . . .

The day breaks over a parking lot here, and the homeless stir from a thousand miserable sleeps. Piles of rotting fish, heaped on a nearby dock, emit a putrid stink. Through the riot of horns and smog that accompanies Bombay’s morning traffic comes the sound of laughter.

“Hahahaha!”

“Ho-ho-ho-ho!”

“Aaaaaahh-hahahahaha!”

The Jogger’s Park laughing club is flooding the air with its humorous intent: the gut-busting laughter of a hundred sari-clad, dhoti-wearing Indians. In parks and parking lots across India, men and women, doctors and shopkeepers, teachers and clerks are coming together to begin their day with 20 minutes of forced guffaws.

Equal parts mysticism and Marx Brothers, India’s laughing clubs have become a national phenomenon, offering their mostly middle-class members a moment of joy in a country shot through with sadness and poverty.

“No one ever laughs in this country,” said Pushpa Goenka, a social worker and laughing club devotee. “We see a lot of misery here. If I start my day with a laugh, my whole outlook changes.”

The clubs, which organizers say number at least 150 in urban areas nationwide, have prompted some observers to discern the beginnings of a shift in the Indian psyche. In a country where comedy clubs and stand-up comedians are rare, groups dedicated to laughter might change India for the better, they say.

“We are a singularly humorless nation,” said Khushwant Singh, a journalist and author who has written five humor books. “There are too many sacred things here. The average person takes himself too seriously. Perhaps if people are seen making fun of themselves, then other people will decide that’s OK.”

The laughing clubs’ catalyst was Madan Kataria, a jovial Bombay physician and yoga enthusiast. Three years ago, he invited four friends to Lokhandwala Park near his home. They stood in a circle and shared a laugh. Almost immediately, he says, other people began turning up. Today, the club has about 100 members, and at least 50 of them show up each morning at sunrise.

Kataria says he receives calls and letters daily from people wanting to form clubs. In Bombay alone, there are 50; in Calcutta, 24. Kataria and his laughing clubs have been featured on Indian television, in newspapers and in magazines. He operates a Web site at https://www.indiabuzz.com/laughter/index.htm

And, when Kataria declared Jan. 11 “World Laughter Day,” 10,000 people turned out at a Bombay race course to chuckle together.

Kataria is convinced that India, for all its problems, could stand to lighten up.

“We Indians are a very serious people,” said the 42-year-old Kataria, whose face is free of expression lines. “We don’t laugh. We don’t smile. We pass each other in the park and we don’t say hello. After being ruled by the British for so long, I think we suffer from an inferiority complex.

“I’m attempting a social transformation.”

Kataria came up with the idea for the clubs after reading the 1979 bestseller “Anatomy of an Illness” by the late Norman Cousins, who found that even short periods of laughter helped ease the painful symptoms of his arthritis-related disease.

When Kataria and his four friends first got together in March 1995, they stood around and told jokes. After a month, Kataria said, their club had grown to 50 people but the jokes had grown stale. Some people--such as women and Sikhs, the butt of many standard Indian jokes--were offended by the ethnic and sexist cracks.

So Kataria and his friends decided they would just laugh outright, unprompted by jokes. Taking a cue from yoga, Kataria decided to break up the bouts of laughter with bits of stretching and deep breathing.

“I may laugh for no reason, but you, seeing me, will also laugh,” Kataria said. “When I see you laugh, I will laugh in response. It’s auto-suggestion.”

One recent morning, about 100 members of the Jogger’s Park club gathered in the parking lot--men on one side, women on the other. Most were dressed in a mix of traditional Indian and Western clothing--sweatshirts and dhotis, turbans and jeans, saris and sneakers.

The club originally met inside the park, but members’ guffaws prompted complaints about noise pollution. They moved to the parking lot.

The group began with deep breathing, then a warmup exercise in which everyone shouted, in unison, “Ho-ho, ha-ha! Ho-ho, ha-ha!”

Then the hard-core laughing began, with adherents working their way through seven different laughs: the “hearty laugh,” the “silent laugh” (laugh without making a sound), the “closed-mouth laugh,” the “dancing laugh,” the “swinging laugh” (laugh twice quickly and then once at great length), the “one-meter laugh” (laugh while measuring an imaginary object 1 meter long), and the “cocktail laugh” (mix the laughs together).

Somewhere in the middle of the Jogger’s Park session, the forced laughter gave way to spontaneous giggles and guffaws.

“Hahahaha!” the group roared. “Hohohoho!”

By the end of the session, everyone appeared flushed, happy and relaxed.

“I used to have a pain in my knees, pains in my neck, but they are gone now,” said Jyoti Varma, a 55-year-old mother of three. “My whole outlook on life has changed. My daughters ask me now: ‘Mommy, what’s happened to you? You’ve changed.’ ”

Poverty as Impetus

Some members say the clubs are a response to the poverty that overwhelms most Indian cities, a shabbiness that, for even the well-to-do, is difficult to escape.

Take Bombay. India’s business center, it is home to luxury apartments selling for as much as $3 million. Yet official estimates show that more than half the city’s residents--or more than 6 million people--live in the streets or in primitive shacks.

“I think these laughing clubs are a magnificent response to the incredible stresses of living here,” said Suketu Mehta, a writer in Bombay. “We have some of the most expensive real estate in the world, and shantytowns on every available piece of land. Perhaps laughing is the only thing to do.”

One of the regulars at the Lokhandwala Park laughing club is R. K. Tandon, a tax planner. His modern office is surrounded by crumbling buildings and rutted streets. For the past two years, Tandon has been involved in a dispute with the Bombay bureaucracy, which he says owes him the equivalent of $800.

“I’ll never get the money,” Tandon said. “They acknowledge that they owe it to me. That’s not an issue. But they want letters. They want verification. I have to see this person, chat with that one, take someone out to dinner. What it comes down to is, I would have to bribe someone.”

Tandon leaned back in his chair.

“But for 20 minutes a day, when I go to my laughing club, I forget the world.”

Kamini Bathija, a municipal counselor in Bombay, has been coming to the Jogger’s Park laughing club since 1995. She lives in a middle-class home, but one of her duties is to try to provide city services to the dozen shantytowns in the ward she oversees.

“I have to solve every problem in the city,” Bathija said. “Rats, malaria, trash in the streets, homeless people--everything you can imagine.

“The laughing club has made a real difference in my life,” she said. “I’ve got more energy. I don’t get tired anymore. I don’t get so depressed.”

Members of laughing clubs in Bombay and Hyderabad told similar stories. Nagging pains, insomnia, depression, asthma--all vanished because of the daily giggles.

At the Port Trust Park laughing club--on the other side of Bombay--five members have high blood pressure. Four have undergone angioplasty, and two have had coronary bypasses. At the Jogger’s Park club, eight members have had bypasses.

When S. Husani, a diabetic retired security manager for the Indian railways, joined the Port Trust Park club a year ago, his blood pressure was hovering around 170/90. Now, after several months of daily laughs, Husani’s blood pressure has retreated to 140/80, and his blood sugar has stabilized.

“We must be getting something out of this,” Husani said.

Results of Research

Medical research suggests that laughter is indeed connected to better health through its stimulation of a range of responses in the body’s immune system. Other experiments have concluded that people with a well-developed sense of humor have higher levels of immunoglobulin A, an antibody secreted in saliva to ward off respiratory diseases such as asthma--and in India, with its polluted cities, the asthma rate is among the highest in the world.

While the laughing clubs are relatively new, India has a long history of turning to homespun medicine. Every June, half a million people converge on a tiny whitewashed home in the Old City of Hyderabad to swallow a certain type of live fish--said to provide a cure for asthma.

Deepak Chopra, the Indian-born endocrinologist, has sold millions of books worldwide by pushing a holistic, traditionally Indian approach to well-being that stresses yoga, meditation, nutrition and a mind-set free of anger and envy.

And Kataria’s clubs weren’t the first to use laughter as therapy. The Osho commune, founded by the late guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, integrated laughter into its program of meditation and spiritual rebirth years ago.

Some at the Osho commune regard the new clubs as upstarts whose laughter--unprompted by meditation--is phony.

“They’re wasting their energy,” said Swami Chaianya Keerti, a spokesman for the commune.

The members don’t think so. At Jogger’s Park, the laughing is over by 7:30 a.m., and Kataria and friends then pile into a car and head for home. On the way, they drive around potholes and trash, past shacks and a dead dog.

“Things are not going to change here,” Kataria said. “You have to change yourself.”

New Delhi Bureau chief Filkins was recently on assignment in Bombay. Scott Wilson in The Times’ editorial library contributed to this report.