There is a town in Maharashtra called Phaltan. It sits in the Satara district, about 110 kilometers southeast of Pune, on the road that runs between the Western Ghats and the dry plateau country toward the sea. The name comes from an old Marathi word, phalstan — the place of fruits. About fifty thousand people live there. It is the kind of town that is well-known inside its own region and unknown outside it.
This is where Bhalchandra Chandrakant Dhekane was born, on the second of February, 1985.
The road to Pune
He grew up between two places — Phaltan, where he was born, and the small village of Niravagaj near Baramati, where his family's settlement, Dhekane Vasti, has stood for generations. Both are quiet, agricultural, Marathi-speaking towns of the kind that produce many of India's serious students, who travel to Pune for university and then either stay or return.
He went to Pune.
Pune is the yoga capital of the modern world, in the precise sense that B.K.S. Iyengar lived and taught there for more than six decades, and the institute he founded in 1975 — the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute, the place that everyone in the global Iyengar tradition refers to simply as Pune — sits in the south of the city. Around it, over generations, an entire ecosystem has formed: shalas, universities with departments serious about the practice, hospitals where yoga is used as therapy, rehabilitation centers, study groups, presses, and the long, slow chain of teachers and students that Indians call parampara.
Bhalchandra entered that ecosystem and stayed for sixteen years.
What sixteen years inside the work looks like
He taught at Sahyadri Iyengar Yogashala, in both its Pune and Baramati locations — so that when he went home to the village, he was still in the practice. He spent four years at Iyengar Yogshala Nigadi. He was a visiting teacher at Symbiosis College, Khadki, for ten years. He taught for four years in the Department of Sanskrit at Savitribai Phule Pune University — to graduate students and professors of the ancient language in which yoga's foundational texts were written. He taught for three years at the Akurdi Anti-Corruption Department, to police officers. He taught for seven years at the Savitribai Phule Pune University Health Center.
He taught children at Dnyandeep Orphanage. He taught patients at Hardikar Hospital.
And he taught soldiers — for years — at the Paraplegic Rehabilitation Center for the Army in Khadki. The Centre was built to give a life back to men whose spinal cords had been severed in service. The men in those wards do not perform yoga. They use it to relearn the body that is left to them.
There are not many places in the world where a teacher learns more about what yoga actually does.
The credentials, briefly
Bhalchandra holds a Master's in Yoga from Kavi Kulguru Kalidas Sanskrit University in Nagpur, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Yoga from Kaivalyadham, in Lonavala. Kaivalyadham was founded in 1924 by Swami Kuvalayananda — the figure who, a generation before B.K.S. Iyengar, did more than anyone to set yoga inside a frame that could speak to modern medicine. It remains one of the oldest and most respected yoga research institutes in the world.
He also holds a Master's in History from Savitribai Phule Pune University, and a Bachelor's degree in Physical Education from the University of Pune. He completed Levels I, II, and III of the yoga certification standard issued by the Ministry of AYUSH of the Government of India.
He competed in the 2013 Maharashtra State Yoga Championships. None of this appears on the studio walls.
Bucharest, 2022
In 2022, the Embassy of India in Romania invited him to come to Bucharest as Teacher of Indian Culture — a role the Embassy maintains in capitals around the world to carry India's traditions into the cultural life of the host city. India and Romania have maintained diplomatic relations since 1948, and the International Day of Yoga — the observance proposed by India to the United Nations General Assembly in 2014 — had been celebrated annually in Romania, with the Embassy's support, since 2015. By 2024 it would reach seventeen Romanian cities in a single morning.
In Bucharest he taught yoga at the Embassy. He taught Hindi at the Romanian-American University. He coordinated the Embassy's International Day of Yoga celebrations from 2022 through 2025.
He taught seniors, free of charge, at four community centers across the city — Bazilescu in Sector 1, Basarabia in Sector 2, Plumbuita in Sector 3, and the Conacul Golescu-Grant recreation center in Sector 6. He taught children at the "Pinocchio" complex for child protection (DGASPC Sector 3), and at orphanages around Bucharest.
He was teaching, in other words, the same range of bodies he had taught in Pune — children, older adults, recovering people — only now in a different city, in a different language, in a place where Iyengar yoga had no settled institution.
That last fact is the reason for YOGAL.
Why YOGAL
There was no Iyengar yoga studio in Bucharest, in the sense that the Iyengar tradition recognizes the word — a working space with the full set of props, a schedule of formats from introductory to therapeutic, and a teacher formed inside the tradition rather than outside it. There were yoga studios. There were good teachers. There was no Iyengar studio.
YOGAL exists to be that. It is the studio that follows from sixteen years in the Pune ecosystem and three years of teaching the city of Bucharest, room by room. It runs on the same principles that produced the teacher — slowness, repetition, attention, props, breath, time.
The community center work continues. The orphanage classes continue. The Embassy connection remains. The IDY coordination has run its course. The studio, in Globalworth Tower, is the place where the work assembles into a practice that can hold.
The teacher you meet at the door
You will meet him at the door, in most cases, because the studio is small and he is the one who teaches the classes. He will not introduce himself by his credentials. He will ask if you have done yoga before. He will tell you where to place the brick. He will say very little during the class, and what he says, he will say slowly.
This is the practice he was taught. It is now the practice he teaches.