There are few more curious spectator sports than vomiting to order. But I have swallowed a litre and a half of warm, salty water — glugging seven glasses in rapid succession under the watchful gaze of my yoga teacher, Sandeep Aggrawalla. (Early in the morning and on an empty stomach and after breathing deeply.) Then I’ve tickled the back of my throat with my fingers. And now I’m throwing up like an elephant, puking saline water in one huge wave. “You’re a natural,” Sandeep enthuses.

The aim of Kunjal (as voluntary regurgitation is known) is to cleanse the stomach, oesophagus, throat, lungs and chest. It’s said to wash out strong acid and excess mucous and, in yogic therapy, it plays a key role in alleviating asthma and preventing ulcers. It takes me about ten minutes, but a pro can do it daily in three. Frankly, it leaves me feeling rather shaky and offcolour.

Then it’s time for Jal Neti — allegedly to alleviate sinusitis, bronchitis and negative thinking. This involves filling a doll’s house teapot with another brew of warm saline solution, tilting my head, popping the spout up one nostril and pouring. The water goes up one nasal cavity and comes out of the other nostril, first in a drip, then in a steady stream. Afterwards my sinuses are born again and I feel clear-headed.

If this sounds crazy, mostly the treatments are wonderful. I’m on the new Yogic Detox programme at Ananda in the Himalayas, one of the world’s loveliest destination spas. Ananda is on a palace estate near Rishikesh, India, a place of pilgrimage. The stupendous location overlooks the Ganges and is filled with music, flowers and an endlessly helpful staff.

The week-long programme includes different Hatha yogic techniques for cleansing internal organs (Shatkriya), asana (yogic postures), pranayama (breathing techniques), meditation and an Ayurvedic diet. I follow a food plan prescribed by an Ayurvedic doctor for my specific dosha, or constitution. The helpings are small and inventive. I have a detox headache on the third day but don’t feel any cravings between meals.

First-rate treatments facilitate further detoxing, with Abhyanga (four-handed synchronised massage) to Choornaswedana (a dreamy massage with warmed herbal poultices). I also practise daily yoga and trek to the nearby temple.

I leave floating on a spiritual cloud, feeling calm, happy, with luminescent skin, having lost a few pounds and with my sinuses and (supposedly) chakras cleared. It seemed like an extreme programme, but it’s a Yogic Detox-lite programme.

Wellbeing Escapes (wellbeingescapes.co.uk) offers a seven-night Ananda Yogic Detox package from £2,400pp, including full board, flights and transfers. British Airways (ba.com) flies to Dehli from £537 return.

A ‘holiday’ camp for Suzuki Method training is exhausting -but it’s worth all the sacrifices, says Caroline Phillips

COUNTESS PACHTA has driven from Germany to stay in an English boarding school.

“Cold showers, queueing for food and being woken at night by false fire alarms is romantic,” she says. “We can’t do this at home.”

“I went to boarding school, so this is familiar,” adds Masamichi Yokoi, the president and chief executive of Daiwa Europe, a Japanese securities conglomerate.

“But I wasn’t expecting to sleep somewhere without a private bathroom.”

Meanwhile, Simon Bruce, a partner at the law firm Farrer & Co, has to sleep in a dormitory with his wife and four children. Down the corridor, Lord Strathclyde (the leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords) is also sharing a bathroom with strangers. “Just like being back at school, except the food’s better,” he says.

This is my third year here, so I know to smuggle in La Fromagerie survival food parcels and my goosefeather pillow. You would hardly guess that we are here for our children to learn music.

“It’s wonderful to see the incredible progress my daughter makes in music in a short period,” says Yokoi. “It’s hard work for the parents,” adds Strathclyde, the father of three talented pianists. “But there are huge social, emotional and intellectual benefits for the children.” A four-year-old girl with bunches walks by carrying a violin that is one sixty-forth the size of a full concert violin. By the end of the week, like many of the children here, she will have performed a solo in front of up to 600 people.

This is the London Suzuki Group International Summer School, a week-long violin, viola, cello and piano course held each year at Bryanston School, in Dorset. It is organised by London teachers of Suzuki, a Japanese method of teaching music. There are 236 playing children, aged 4 to 17, with participants and 39 teachers from as far afield as Israel and Colombia. Plus enough pianos to stretch the length of Sloane Street.

All the Bryanston places were snapped up weeks before the closing date for applications. There was a long waiting list, which included children who had performed at the Royal Festival Hall. Why? Because it is inspirational. By the end there are phenomenal orchestral and chamber music performances by children who met only days before. It’s also like being back at school, except that parents have to observe all their children’s lessons. It’s exhausting and intensive.The Suzuki method was devised in the 1930s by Dr Shinchi Suzuki, who noted children’s capacity to learn their mother tongue fluently. If infants could master a complex language such as Japanese by the age of 6, he argued, they must be able to learn a musical instrument with comparable ease if training began at 2 or 3. Dr Suzuki challenged the belief in innate musical talent: “There is no such thing… the secret is repetition.”

Parental involvement and encouragement are prerequisites. Suzuki parents attend all their children’s private and group lessons throughout the year and oversee their daily practice. The triangle of parent, teacher and child is a defining feature of the method.

Parental involvement can be very useful in the early stages of learning and provides additional motivation -however, says Dr Susan Hallam, a music psychologist at the University of London, “as children become older they may rely on their parents, which is counter-productive”.

Learning is by listening, and sight-reading is delayed. “Because they learn to play by ear initially means that sometimes they find it difficult to read music,” says Hallam.

Some are sceptical about such intensive training for young children. “I’m against hot-housing,” says Helen Likierman, a clinical psychologist and Suzuki mum who has attended Bryanston since 1988. “But this is about developing self-motivation, self-confidence and a sense of achievement.”

There is no selection process for the summer school. The first year, my daughter Ella played in her concert with just her right hand after only three lessons: the teacher pointed out to her the correct playing finger. At Bryanston, under-7s study three hours a day; older children have private lessons. And group lessons.

Then there’s swimming, squash, tennis and meeting friends. The week costs Pounds 385 for children over 7 and the same for parents. “We can do it only because of a bursary,” says Collette Morris, the deputy head of a state primary school and a Bryanston regular. Her eldest son once sold his saxophone to contribute to his brother’s fees. “Lots of people struggle to do Suzuki. I’ve cancelled my pension contributions to pay for it.”

Dr Suzuki’s intention wasn’t to produce professional musicians; he nursed a deeper purpose. Yehudi Menuhin recalled him saying that his ambition was to create amateurs who might give themselves the joy of music and contribute to the harmony of society. Dr Suzuki believed in developing sensitivity, discipline, endurance and a beautiful heart. As I watch my children performing in their concerts, I think he got it right.

*Details of the next school (August 21-28) from lsg@suzukimusic.net

This week a commission of historians will deliver their verdict on the wartime conduct of Kurt Waldheim. For his most ardent supporter, his daughter Christa, there can be only one possible outcome.

‘IF I opened a paper tomorrow and read that my father had killed somebody, it wouldn’t throw me.’ The same woman later says: ‘It’s sometimes hard to keep your sanity and stop yourself going crazy.’ She is Dr Christa Karas-Waldheim, a 28-year-old law graduate and daughter of Dr Kurt Waldheim. The youngest of his three children by 11 years, she is the closest to her father and the most politically motivated.

Her relationship with her father is, she admits rather awkwardly, ‘abnormal’. She talks about him in romantic terms: ‘I always felt he understood me, never felt I couldn’t reach out. If he’s busy we can see each other at midnight.’ When she married last June – her husband is Austria’s most prominent young conservative politician – her father was not displaced. ‘I added his name to my married one because I feel very close to both of them.’ In Karas-Waldheim’s eyes, ‘Papi’, as she calls him, can do no wrong.

When her father decided to run for the Austrian Presidency in 1985 for the conservative People’s Party, after being rejected for a third term as Secretary-General of the United Nations, she left her job at the Austrian Academy of Science to campaign for him. ‘He cares about people and wants to help them. He was the best man for the job.’ Single-handedly and supported exclusively by donations, she enlisted thousands into her ‘people’s movement’. She would sleep four hours a night and speek up to eight times a day in different parts of the country, to crowds of sometimes 5,000 people. ‘I had never addressed more than 10 people before. It was terrifying.’

Then, in March 1986, three months before her father was eventually selected, what she wil only term the ‘smear campaign’ started. The World Jewish Congress (WJC) accused her father of being a member of the Nazi ‘browinshirts’ and later serving in a Wehrmacht unit where he must have been aware of the transporting of more than 40,000 Greek Jews to death camps during the Second World War.

His daughter says that the WJC’s ‘evidence’ came from socialist manipulators and that the allegations were ‘unfair weapons and lies’ employed by a frightened opposition.

Talking volubly and maintaining close eye-contact throughout, she constantly refers to her father as a victim and scapegoat. She was, she says, as astonished as her father by his opponents’ tactics.

The WJC claimed that Waldheim’s autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm, published in 1985, was factually incorrect, particularly in its omission of any reference to military service after 1941. He did see further military service – the issue is where and in what capacity. His daughter says that the only stories she had heard about the war years were things like her sister – who is 14 years her elder – being born on a mountain top when her mother fled after the Russian invassion of Vienna.

And her father? ‘He was just a poor soldier in uniform obeying orders. It wasn’t a nice time. He didn’t like to remember it.’

Last autumn the Austrian government published ‘The White Book’ to rebut the WJC allegations and explain Waldheim’s ‘missing years’. During them, Waldheim claims, he served as a translator, as an officer in German intelligence, continued his legal studies then worked as an interpreter and collator of military information. ‘That was a very boring time,’ his daughter says. ‘I can’t imagine that anyone will want to read it.

She believes that she established such a close relationship with her father through being the youngest in the family. ‘I was spoilt, being the baby. My mother is my best girlfriend.’ She grew up in New York during her father’s terms as ambassador and at the United Nations. (Lycee educated, she now speaks ‘Berlitz American’ with a singing Austrian accent.) Rather than isolate her from his hectic life, Waldheim would take her to cocktail and dinner parties, luncheons and on trips. Despite his unremarkable career in the UN – he is best remembered for his arid and ponderous style – Karas-Waldheim says: ‘I saw that he was respected by the whole world. I was so proud of him.’ She was a trained gold and silversmith; but when Waldheim told her that she should study law, she did.

Karas-Waldheim cannot admit even the possibility that her father could be guilty ‘He never gave me any reason not to trust him or think he was lying.’ The greatest proof for her, if she needed it, was that her father managed to keep ‘cool and smiling’ throughout his presidential campaign. ‘It’s very tough to constantly defend yourself over something that you didn’t do. And difficult to lie, or lie on someone’s behalf, for a long time. If his conscience were not 1,000 per cent clean, he would have cracked.’

I ask whether it is not every daughter’s duty to defent her father? ‘It’s not out of duty,’ she snaps. ‘It is the only thing you can do when you love someone who is being attacked and treated unjustly.’ Her mother, she says, is still ‘madly in love’ with the man she met when they were both studying for law degrees. ‘After 43 years of marriage she is still extremely in love with my father and she wants to help him.’

Has she ever thought, in her darkest moments, that her father might have been associated with murderers? She is as taken aback at the word as she is when I mention Kluas Barbie – ‘Barbie was guilty, so should be punished, even after all these years.’ Then ‘No,’ she says in answer to the question about her father. Even if ‘they’ find something, it will, she says, be a forgery or invention.

Hypothetically, if he were guilty, she would defend him. ‘Being a daughter, the most important thing would be to defend your father. My main concern would be to keep his spirits lifted.’ When I ask her what she will tell her children about their grandfather, she is ruffled. The fact that lies can get out of hand, is the gist of her reply.

Karas-Waldheim regards the WJC, who sowed the seeds of doubt about her father’s military career, as a ‘bunch of radicals’, ‘a small group of baddies’, interested in spreading hatred and yearning to achieve a high profile as Nazi hunters. ‘I don’t think they could give a damn about my father: they just want to defend their good reputation. Of course the WJC have approached me. I don’t want to do anything to do with them.’

She doesn’t think that the children of those Jews who were killed have the right to persecute her father. ‘Particularly since he has proved that he didn’t do anything wrong.’ Jews, she adds, were not the only victims in the war. ‘But the children of these victims are making an innocent victim of my father.’

Waldheim’s supposed misfortunes initially produced a rallying of support and waves of antisemitism in Austria. Karas-Waldheim says she is not antisemitic. She says she has Jewish friends – ‘as does my father’. She receives crank telephone calls and hate mail (her friends are amused at the rapidity with which she changes her telephone number). Has her father received threats? ‘I don’t know if he tells me everything,’ she says in a rare concession.

Waldheim remains on the Watchlist, barred from the US. ‘Who cares?’ she says. with a great deal of care. ‘I wish he weren’t. But I am sure they will soon take him off and apologize.’ The fact that Austria is isolated – his controversial visit to the Pope last June and his trip to Jordon broke a year-long diplomatic quarantine – is not something that she recognizes. ‘He didn’t become President to see the world,’ she says sitting in the government office in which she works out the logistics of Austria joining the EEC.

People, she adds, were not outraged by his audience with the Pope. ‘They were proud. They flew a few people in to be outraged.’ Whether or not Waldheim receives the Pope on the papal visit to Austria this June depends on the findings of Hans Kurz and the other historians investigating the president’s wartime activities. There is no question, according to his daughter, that Waldheim should step down. Wherever she goes with him, she says, they hear cheering. ‘He is the luckiest president. There has never been one that the Austrians have shown their approval of so much.’