Chopra And Son
The plot is strangely familiar. The father uses his native shrewdness to build up a corporate empire of some repute. His son is brought up to be the natural successor to the CEOs chair. Now its the sons maiden venture, chiefly a means of introducing him to the world at large. The question is not so much whether hell succeed, but how well he fills his fathers shoes.
Gautama Chopra, like most young men in a similar situation, began his training at a very early age. When Gautama was about five, my wife, Rita and I made sure that he learned to meditate, says his father, Deepak Chopra, MD, in the foreword. He adds that, in his opinion, Gautama is one of the critical mass of enlightened new leaders in the coming generation, who will help to bring about the dawn of a new consciousness which is ready to transform the world. (Incidentally, Deepak Chopra makes an eyebrow-raising mistake himself: Gautama does not literally mean the enlightened one, even though its the Buddhas name it means first among the cows, at a rough translation.)
Chopra Junior seems to have decided to transform the world by going the way of all enlightened flesh writing a book that will hopefully become a cult classic, get him onto Americas hottest chat shows, and who knows, perhaps even achieve nirvana in the form of a website. There is nothing wrong with the blueprint, except for one minor detail he cant write for toffee. Child of the Dawn is like being forced to re-read Kahlil Gibrans The Prophet or Herman Hesses Siddhartha, as rewritten by a man who suffered from a very small vocabulary and a very large paucity of imagination.
In so far as it has a plot, it centres around a youngster called Hakim who is in search of something. Since hes in the process of swiping a mango when we first see him, food preferably either limitless amounts of it or limitless amounts of wealth appears to be the sole object of his quest. Not so, says the author. Hakim (the word translates as Doctor, incidentally, presumably as a tribute to Gautamas father) is actually in search of spiritual sustenance. Theres a strong undercurrent that suggests hell find it in a book called The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and if you dont know who the author of that is, Im not going to tell you.
Dogging Hakims footsteps is a man called the Master, who was the headmaster of the orphanage where Hakim once was. There is something sinister about the Master, who has a habit of letting a slight smile run across his face in a menacing sort of way. There is also something familiar about the Master, and after some thought I realised what it was hes the spitting image of the wicked magician in Disneys Aladdin. But Hakim is not alone he is aided and abetted throughout the story by a long succession of women, from Sunali to Maya to a Tarot card reader. They seem to be part of the same sect, conspiracy, sorority, whatever at any rate, most of them wear a ring with a green stone set in it. None of them, however, are the wise one that Hakims looking for the man wholl lead him to power and wealth beyond imagination.
He does, however, meet a fisherman, who in the best traditions of The Old Man and the Sea, cmakes him first catch a fish and then chuck it back. And a truckdriver, who has lessons to impart about the road as metaphor for life. Several pages of fluff down the line, Hakim is finally tested, as the Master offers him the key to wealth and power. The outcome is predictable; our hero emerges valiant and our reader emerges sobbing pitifully and promising to be a better man if he doesnt have to read this bilge any more.
Even by the standards of New Age parable, The Child of the Dawn is an appalling failure. The worst SF and fantasy writers still ensure that when they send the hero off on a quest, the readers get some sense of why he, in particular, has been singled out.
The importance of the quest, its ramifications and what it stands for as a metaphor is usually also made clear to the reader. Gautama Chopra skips all of this as inessential detail, and offers nothing in compensation, not even the occasionally palatable prose of a Kahlil Gibran. True, hes just a 21-year-old enrolled in Columbia University, but if youre a New Age heir, youve got to come up with better than this.
Even by the standards of New Age parable, The Child of the Dawn is an appalling failure. Child of the Dawn
Gautama Chopra, Published by Viking, PRICE ON JACKET, 180 pages