Satori. In the blind, last-straw search of whether youve come here in the first place. You are the New Age Conquistadors latest victim "" and you actually think youre a voluntary visitor?
Dont be daft. This 'freedom things a con. Where youve come floundering for solace is Mystique India 96: it coyly confesses that its Indias first attempt at selling the only resource we have so much of in abundance that weve manufactured entire political parties to liquidate chunks of it to keep the prices high: Eastern wisdom.
Mystique India 96 is the countrys 'organised debut ambush at the approach roads to the global 'personal improvement jamboree, this centurys fastest-growing industry; 30-odd centuries of religio-mythic advice and aggro-marketed 20th century DIY post-trauma poultices slapped together with all the alacrity of a photogenic Big Mac burger. And probably as nutritious. God couldnt have put together a surer winner.
In the New Age jungle of Mystique India, what you couldnt have missed is a newly-discovered flamboyant sub-species of New Agers with an unmistakable signature: high-society survival gear comprising Calvin Klein jeans, Camel polo shirts, Hush Puppies, surrounded by the marsh gas of exclusive parfum, all below the neck "" married to unwashed Naga baba-style dreadlocks. Its a vision so startling and paradoxical that it almost escaped the notice of the hecklers who make a habit of visiting fairs for a glimpse of societys netherworld. Oh, all right, almost escaped.
The mossy mess of dreadlocks is also a traffic stopping motif that fits the image of the Indian neo-New Ager so completely that it has to be a God-provided icon. This sub-species, confidently striding from stall to stall, took the expositions participants by storm.
Meena Thakur (not my real name and no photographs please) is a member of this sub-species and says that she is one of the intellectual idealogues of this Indian Rastamon lookalikes club; Thakur is a cosmeticians delight but a hair designers nightmare: Sylvie refused to do me. Approach her with the least degree of flippancy and she is likely to bite your scalp off. Her search for enlightenment is serious. She denies that her matted hair is snobbery stood on its head, a sign of self-conscious self-adoration and not, as Im certain of, the other way round. You could call it self-mortification if you wanted to, she says dismissively. To me its an act of omission, not commission. All Ive done is 'not cut my hair and 'not combed it. Wheres the vanity in that?
For all purposes, the hair plays the same function as the poorly imitated, pretend-military epaulettes on a liftman: it declares who he is, what he is, what his function is, how competent he is (if he had had the talent for being more than a liftman, he wouldnt have been a liftman, etc).
Ms Mathur is one of the tribe that takes life very seriously. In the greater scheme of things, she belligerently insists, her head counts.
Approximation headcounting by the Indian Trade Promotion Organisation (ITPO), which cobbled together Mystique India virtually from scratch, has it that over one million Indians ambled through the exhibition, building up a sales corpus of roughly Rs 24 crore. Post-dated promissory sales added another Rs 30-odd crore to the kitty. 75-80 per cent of the transactions took place at about 10-12 stalls. The rest of the stalls were onlookers as awestruck by the popularity of the abovementioned 10-12 as Attila the Nuns horde.
The Osho Stall. There Is No Alternative (stall no D11): the largest pitstop at the exposition, a joining of five stalls, carried this brazen legend above its entrance. Swami Teesta (an alias) watched while the kind of people who would never have made it through the gates of the Pune ashram "" you know, who have a rattletrap Bajaj scooter as the family vehicle "" took hours scrutinising with the singleminded devotion of those desperate to convert the promo matter on the partition screens.
The Osho-TINA stall had to cart a tempo-load every day of books, audio cassettes and videos of Oshos Zen exhortations, made both while he was alive and, a few times "" hold your breath "" posthumous. The man, undeniably sage but often patronising in real life, continues to talk down from wherever he is levitated at the moment. Dominique Mantilla had been rudely bounced out of the Pune communes gate "" but he remains a representative of an undying tribe: intelligent professionals riven with angst, including middle-level secretaries, accountants, small franchisees of top-o-the-line Japanese and European domestic electronic gadgets, three-star hotel band members, and, significantly, a large proportion of the self-employed footsoldiers of the New Age faith, exposed to books, videos and cassettes hagiographically hawking New Age consumer products.
The (Russian) World Association of Parapsychology (stall no E5): The fact that Naeem Siddiqui, who spent eight hours ambling through the exposition before he shortlisted the stall he wanted to go to, owns a steel and brass scrap shop in Delhis Chawri Bazar doesnt seem to fit into his private character of a fanatically vegan New Ager. But he has stopped going to the Friday prayers at Jama Masjid because of the pervasive smell of flesh and offal that he says intrudes into the inner quadrangle of the mosque. He keeps a box of Tibetan dhoop in his Cielo because, among other things, the smell is a reminder of mortality. And I became a New Ager precisely because I dont want to be reminded of it. In pursuit of serenity, he even took a fortnight off to attend the Bihar School of Yoga.
But it is the mystery surrounding the issue of extra-sensory perception (ESP) that led him to keep in touch with worldwide developments in telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, etc. Siddiqui believes in domestic ghosts "" not as ghosts but as ectoplasmic extrusions locked within the walls of a house by some act of human sadism and all. He is a member of a fraternity that is rational to the bone. He does not believe in planchets or ouija boards or dowser experiments into the unknown. His belief in God is scratchy at best, surfacing only when Im in trouble that Im either too lazy or too incompetent to handle.
Silva Method (stall no G4): Jose Silvas mugshot is unimpressive but the human gaggle in front of the stall isnt. The Silva Method is said to work at least 90 per cent of the time, says Rajiv Dar, NGO staffer. An accident of genetics rendered him mildly schizophrenic. After much experimentation and many doctors, he came upon Silva. It changed his life, not by curing his handicap but by making me accept it and work around it. But its hard, its hard. Dar is very obviously still mentally tremulous. I caught him at a spit-and-gum stall offering to give you a Kirlian aura photograph for Rs 800 a shot. He had spent a day stalking both the stall and the idea of something that could be quite unflattering given his debility. And then he sold the idea to himself. The aura showed me as not too disturbed and on the way to a cure. I know this could be a placebo effect and I may have convinced myself and am psychosomatically better, but what the hell. I am better, am I not?
Indicative of homeopathy effect was the fact that the most crowded stalls were those of homeopathy, not of the much-touted and argot-ridden indigenous systems like Ayurveda and Unani. It is a social statement: people go in for alternative repair systems that have no paranoia-rousing hidden agenda and use the least gobbledygook in their promos and prescriptions. Over the years, homeopathy has become completely up-front, and perhaps more transparent, than regular allopathy. Any mystique it might have had it has sloughed off in the interests of establishing it in the mainstream.
B S Sharma, a junior but humongously-paid accountant in a multinational brewery, cant see anything at all in the dark, a malady for which, he says, allopathy has no answer. He is into homeopathy now, and liking it because the systems contraindications do not include social tippling, which he is victim to because of the company that runs his life. Its a dream treatment which, he says he will never find anywhere else.
Ditto for Sister Maria Souza. As a trained nurse who worked herself to the bone for five years in Mother Teresas halfway house for AIDS patients in New Yorks Village, she is now back in Delhi, a hyper-tense clinician working for a national consortium researching into homeopathic treatment for AIDS. There are claims that some Unani doctors have found no-contraindications in their treatments, but they have not opened themselves to the stringent lab testing that go into allopathy and homeopathy, she says.
This inability to stand up to rational cross-examination is what haunts a majority percentage of the smorgasbord that is New Age. Its here. The funny thing is "" its peripheral logic, a twilight paradigm, the very aspect that seduces the West, is also the very aspect that could shove it aside from progresss path.
