Baba Ramdev's yoga contortions have brought him a lot of success. They earned him a mass following, television shows, political patronage, and a flourishing FMCG business, not always in that order. And now they're bringing him jeers.

The newsweekly India Today put the yoga guru on the cover of its latest issue, with the cover line "Power Yogi" and the strapline "How Baba Ramdev discovered commerce and turned spirituality on its head to emerge as a political, economic and cultural superbrand."

The cover image by photographer Bandeep Singh has Ramdev in a kind of Prasarita Padottanasana, or a wide-legged forward bend, facing the camera from in between the legs. The article by Kaushik Deka speaks of Ramdev’s many successes.

The image sent Twitter into peals of laughter.

The yoga guru has built an enviable FMCG empire in just eight years. His Patanjali group manufacturers everything  from toothpaste and rice to noodles and chyavanprash . By some accounts, Patanjali earned revenues of around Rs 5,000 crore in the last financial year and wants to double that to Rs 10,000 crore by 2017.