"What's not to like about yoga?" she says. "It's all about breathing right, replenishing supplies of oxygen, feeling better about life."
Followers say the movement is about more than just tension-releasing lessons - it is also about community service.
"Our spirituality is functional," says Shankar, who this year travelled to war-torn Iraq to impart his breathing technique.
Many people who do the course later work as Art of Living volunteers, the movement says.
Breathe out trauma
"We teach people whose lives have been torn apart by natural disasters and wars to breathe out their trauma," says Kakar, the programme director.
Volunteers like Kakar have taught Shankar's techniques to survivors of the devastating 2004 Asian tsunami. Indian soldiers fighting Islamic militants in Kashmir learn the breathing as part of an army bid to cut stress in the ranks.
Art of Living teams also lead convicts in breathing courses at prisons in India, Canada, the United States and elsewhere. And at India's premier state-run medical facility, the All-India Institute of Medicine, the course is used to help drug addicts in rehab.
"We find addicts who do the course have higher motivation to recover," says psychiatrist Anju Bhawan.
Shankar is a devout Hindu, but he insists the movement is secular.
"The spirituality or common values are the same in every religion - religion is like the banana skin and spirituality is the banana," he chuckles.
The group, headquartered in a massive wedding cake-style building near the southern city of Bangalore, says it is funded by course fees and donations. It costs US$37 to do a course in India and several hundred dollars abroad.
"You can't do charity out of an empty bowl. We do programs, we earn money and we spend it on charity," said Kakar.
Many practitioners say Shankar's program changed their lives.
"It brought me a lot of inner peace," says Ajay Bagga, 38, chief executive of Lotus Asset Management in Mumbai. "I'd been a very aggressive, task-oriented manager, and then I became a much more humane kind of boss."
Shankar shrugs off his worldwide fame, but an adoring personality cult has nevertheless developed around him. Followers call him "His Holiness."
The guru, whose middle class parents were keen for him to be a bank manager, says he knew early on that he wanted to lead a spiritual life. He displayed a precocious ability to master the Hindu scriptures as a child, followers say.
"I would bunk the sports class and come home early. I would go to play football, and looking at my feet, I would say, 'these feet are going to be worshipped, they cannot kick anybody, let alone an inanimate ball'," he says.
Shankar may not have been an athlete in his youth, but he insists he never wants to grow up - and thinks his breathing and meditation techniques will help him do that.
"I am just a child. I am no different from any one of you. Everyone has a childlikeness in them," he says, again with his signature giggle.
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