Soul Food

The Jack Canfield factory is beating Knorr and Maggi hands down "" with just one flavour of packaged soup on offer. Canfield's Chicken Soup series, a collection of home-spun wisdom and anecdotes, debuted with Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for the last two years. Some 13 books down the line, the series has sold over 5 million copies in the US alone, and inspired Forbes magazine to dub him and his co-author, Mark Victor Hansen, the 'Happiness Hucksters'.

That ushers the 52-year-old Canfield, formerly a university teacher and a qualified psychotherapist, into the major league of gurudom, along with other luminaries such as John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and Deepak Chopra. And like Chopra, he's converted the doling out of spiritual assistance into a successful US-based management concern, The Canfield Training Group, which boasts clients such as General Electric and Sunkist. Canfield offers a wide range of seminars, including such forms of group therapy as Self-Esteem Seminars and Couples Seminars.

Canfield was in Delhi recently at the behest of Apollo Hospital's Dr Pratap Reddy, to give a series of Soul Suppers. The price of inspiration was Rs 15,000 per couple, with the proceeds going to cancer victims. He waxed enthusiastic about his stay in India, expressing only one regret: I really wanted to meet Mother Teresa, but unfortunately we couldn't get our act together.

Naturally, chicken soup was on the menu at the Taj Palace Hotel in Delhi "" with the addition of morels making it slightly different from mother's own recipe. Vegetarians got just the essence of morels, sans chicken.

Said Canfield during the course of his two-hour spiel, We'd like to do a Chicken Soup for the Indian Soul "" but so many Indians are vegetarians that we might have to call it Khichdi for the Indian Soul. Or perhaps Ganges Water for the Indian Soul.

It remains to be seen whether the ersatz chicken soup will share the same success as the rest of his books. Even if it doesn't, Canfield has a fallback plan. It's his next book, and it's going to be called Chicken Soup for the Global Soul.