During morning assembly, they make an unusual sight. With their eyes closed, they adjust their breathing to a collective rhythm — five seconds in, five seconds out— as their teacher, Dr Mullika Shrivastava, counts from one to five.

A flute rendition by Grammy winning flautist Pandit Rajendra Prasanna as background music helps them to concentrate on their hearts, and more importantly, makes them calmer, says Dr Anand, a London-based general practitioner of Indian origin, who brought his “HeartPower” technique to the school last year.

While moving around the Capital, where he has introduced his technique to a thousand burnt-out executives, golfers and government babus, he travels with a pair of Emwaves, a laptop and a screen projector. The paraphernalia, he says, is for the sceptics.

The Emwaves — a type of sensors that once attached to the finder or ear lobes, record a pattern in heart beats and transfer them to the computer, where data comes as endless jagged lines on the screen that reflect stress levels in a person. “The more variations your heart beat records, the more you are expected to live,” he says.

Since April 2007, when Anand first visited schools in Delhi, Shrivastava has been training students at her school in the exercise and says the results have been encouraging. “For the last eleven months, all my students got four minutes of the HeartPower technique and the results are amazing. The improvement in underperforming students is spectacular,” she says.

Many exhibited improved concentration, inter-personal behaviour, memory and even helped get the better of their ailments, she adds. Like Akansha Siwach, a Class VII student at the school who suffers from asthma. “Because of asthma, I needed an inhaler twice daily but now I am nearly off nebulisers and take it once in three to five weeks,” she says.

The hi-tech relaxation technique, which uses a breathing rhythm and music along with technology to monitor and soothe heart movements as a stress-busting exercise, is already a hit with primary schools, burnt-out executives and sportspersons in the United Kingdom. “People in India are being misled by allopathy, which only cures the symptoms. But HeartPower is better as it requires just five minutes everyday and is also not hindered by notions of religiosity,” he says.

The beginning, made a year ago, in eight Delhi schools was rough. “Most confused it with yoga and many were simply not open to the idea,” Anand says. His surveys there revealed alarming findings, he says. He found children wanting to jump out of windows, slit their veins and wanting to yell at the slightest of provocation. That’s where the doctor thinks HeartPower can help.