With his shoulder length hair and thick eyelashes, Yuree Mak looks like the lead singer of a metal band.
He is in fact a world famous Bangladeshi martial artist, and a bona-fide world record holder to boot.
The first time I called Yuree’s PR to arrange an interview, I was told: “Sadly you’ve just missed him. He’s gone to Savar. He’s training 1000 Ansar paramilitaries in unarmed combat.”
Fight club
Named after the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Dr Mak runs Rangers, a company that provides self-defence training to various government agencies.
In addition to the Bangladesh security forces, Rangers’ client list includes a number of well-known western intelligence agencies, the details of which are strictly hush-hush.
Exciting as such work sounds to me, Yuree concedes that it’s not really his passion: “I do the self-defence stuff for the money but my real passion is martial arts. I’ve always wanted to be a Grand Master and to teach my own system.”
This helps explain why, despite attending Cadet College and wowing senior officers and teachers with his exceptional physical skills, Yuree could not be cajoled into joining the army.
“I remember the army recruitment officer delayed the selection board especially for me after I missed the application deadline … but I still didn’t turn up.
“I have huge respect for the military but I just wouldn’t have liked being so restricted. I knew if I joined up I would spend my days trapped in the cantonment, doing as I was told.”
Breaking bones, breaking records
A quick search on YouTube pulls up videos of Yuree demonstrating his famous shin kick.
In 2010, Yuree set a new world record when he broke two baseball bats in a single go at a martial arts convention in the UK.
Dissatisfied, Yuree promptly broke his own world record in 2012, when he graduated to breaking three bats in one go.
After setting the world record at the UK’s National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, Yuree was the subject of a Discovery Channel programme and was featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Despite being his claim to fame, Yuree considers the world record breaking a means to a more important end.
Yuree realised early on that if he was to become a Grand Master, with his own martial arts system that people would follow, he had to make a name for himself.
“There are many people teaching martial arts. Why would anyone pay attention to me?”
Some novelty value was needed for the Yuree Mak brand. “I realised that all the Grand Masters with followings had some special skill that had made them well known. There are people who can punch through concrete, lift up cars, take incredible weights on their necks – it’s all been done.”
He settled on the shins, thinking this was an area nobody had yet fully exploited.
“I already knew about this training technique that allows you to strengthen your bones. When you subject a bone to a blunt force, you get micro-fractures. In response, as it heals, the body starts to lay down extra bone matter, eventually thickening and hardening the bone.
“I knew of some people doing this in Myanmar, but they would do it intensively, building up the bone in less than a year. The problem is they all get arthritis by the time they’re 30.”
So Yuree adopted a slow and careful approach. “It was fifteen years before I tried to break a single baseball bat.”
Each attempt is fraught with danger. While micro-fractures are encouraged, a clean break would be career ending.
“Once the leg breaks properly it never heals completely, certainly not enough to break baseball bats ever again.”
The strategy paid off.
The noble art
Having firmly established himself as a world class act, Yuree is now most concerned with developing his own system, Butthan.
The system is “the noble art of enlightenment and stopping fights,” and it has its roots in the rich Southeast Asian tradition from Myanmar and India, the lost history of which is another passion of Yuree’s.
Yuree even went to the Shaolin Monastery in China’s Henan province in order to understand the influence of the Indian martial arts on the better preserved Chinese variants.
At Shaolin, Yuree found a giant statue of Bodhidharma, the Indian Buddhist monk, who is credited with imparting martial arts to his Chinese counterparts for the first time, sometime during the fifth or sixth century AD.
If further proof of the South Asian roots of martial arts were required, the walls inside the temple at Shaolin are adorned with murals featuring ‘dark monks’ instructing the locals in grappling techniques.
Monks of the sub-continent
Despite this heritage of martial arts in the subcontinent, Yuree laments that its history has not been preserved and that martial arts are often seen negatively, particularly here in Bangladesh.
“I often get criticism from people who think that Bhuttan is teaching violence to young people. They do not understand that the martial arts are about discipline and self-control.”
The other thing that irritates him is the insinuation that Bangalis are weak and unsuited to compete in physically arduous pursuits.
“Too many people in Bangladesh think doing extraordinary things is not for us. I want to teach them that they can do it. Young Bangladeshis can break world records.”
