Practice note · 15 October 2026
Doing Time, Doing Vipassana, the film from Tihar Jail
When Kiran Bedi was posted to Tihar Jail in New Delhi as Inspector General of Prisons in 1993, it held about ten thousand people, and nine in ten of them were still waiting for trial. Doing Time, Doing Vipassana, a 1997 documentary by Ayelet Menahemi and Eilona Ariel, tells how ten-day Vipassana courses came into that prison.
Bedi had already set about making the prison easier to live in. What she wanted went deeper: she wanted the prisoners themselves to change. The idea of Vipassana came from one of her own guards. It had been tried in Indian jails before, and in 1993 a first ten-day course was held inside Tihar for about a hundred prisoners. In April 1994 about a thousand sat one course together, and afterwards a meditation centre opened inside the prison.
The film tells all of this in under an hour. The makers have put the whole of it on YouTube, and their page for the film links to it. Bedi speaks, and so do the prisoners. The film goes back briefly to where the technique comes from and to the earlier courses in other jails. It shows, too, how hard it was to fit a course into a prison at all, since a course has strict rules of its own, and so does a jail. Then it turns to the course itself, and that last part is the one to watch closely.
The course is ten days in complete silence. It starts with the breath, and then comes the slow work of feeling the sensations of the body without reacting to them. The makers' own question is a plain one: what do people actually do during those ten days, and what do they come to see?
Several men talk to the camera about their anger and about remorse for what they did. One says the course almost made prison worth it. The film takes them at their word, and it's warm towards them.
The scene most reviewers wrote about is the last one. A course has finished, and the men come out of the meditation hall. A jail superintendent is waiting outside to greet each of them. Some hug him. Some are crying.
The film travelled. It won the Golden Spire at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1998 and reached American cinemas in 2005. Prison officials in other countries saw it and set up courses of their own. The Vipassana Research Institute's history of prison courses names officials in Thailand and Mexico among them.
If you've never sat a ten-day course, the film shows its outline: ten days of silence, the breath first, then the body. For what can be hard about those ten days, see the safety page while you're still deciding. The men in Tihar sat the course anyone can sit at a centre, in an overcrowded prison, and they began where everyone begins: with the breath.
You can begin there too, at home. Part 1 of this course is five days on the natural breath, with the five precepts and two guided sittings of about fifteen minutes a day. It's the same attention to the breath that opens a ten-day course, and five days of it is a reasonable way to find out whether you want the ten.
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