Karma Cola by Gita Mehta

At times sharply insightful, at times sarcastic and witty, Gita Mehta's Karma Cola, bought on impulse at a second-hand bookshop, turned out to contain surprisingly priceless observations about the West's "instant Nirvana" approach to the spiritual hunt in India. The entire book reads like a series of parables; myths about India's natural spiritual resource, floating about, as it were, in the atmosphere, and waiting to be absorbed by the first Western tourist, exhausted with commercialism - all these break down and evaporate (not unlike the way my entire sentence must have, too).

Mehta's basic premise is that the Occident flocks to the East, specifically, India, in a somewhat desperate response to the popularized notion that it is the land of transcendence. Systematically, she breaks down these ideas one by one to arrive at a human truth: on one hand, the Occident does not and cannot fully understand the cultural knowledge that comes with this version of spirituality; secondly, the gurus do not make concessions for their global students because most of the time, they are either too distracted by new-found fame or too involved with their own enlightenment.

But to think that of 1960s, 1970s India as the Amsterdam of the East, with more than a little exoticized redemption in the mix - it is an image indeed. Imagine flocks of bright colored muslin skirts and shirts migrating from California's sunny beaches and arriving in throngs into the streets of Delhi, Bombay, Poona, and Goa. How typical (if one is given to a cynical reading) that even the Indian cinema managed to cash in on this crazy hippie-inspired acid-burnt vision. History, culture and economics crossed paths, shook hands and sat down for an expensive cup of chai.

"At the height of the Nepalese Gold Rush, an Indian matinee idol showed up in Kathmandu, and immediately identified the names of God with the rampant drug scene. Out of his vision came an Indian film that grossed the biggest box office receipts of that year and the next five years. The film owes three quarters of its popularity to the hit song, "Dum Maro Dum." The literal translation of the lyrics reads,

Take a drag. Take a drag. I'm wiped out.
Say it in the morning. Say it in the evening.
Hare Krishna Hare Rama Hare Krishna Hare Rama."

But where one would have expected mass religious indignation, a non-secular India turns around with surprising openness. "The whole continent," she writes, "rocked on to the lyrics" as though aware of the creation of their own brand fetishism, but deciding to have fun with it anyway.

Indian cinema, however, only mirrored the symptoms of the society. Spaced-out, drugged-up hippies who believed they had gained access the root of all being, who insisted on seeing how "beautiful" everything is, ignorant of their own spiritual bigotism. After a morning discourse in a Poona ashram, the disciples ask Mehta:

" 'Did you feel God's aura? Did you get a hit off the energy?' they demanded.
' Well, uh, he's very widely read,' I backtracked, trying to get a bit of room.
They looked at my coldly.
'It's beautiful that you're here. But just why are you here?'
'As a tourist,' I explained.
'Oh,' they said and the steel shutters came down over their eyes."

This sort of elitism is mentioned later again, at the same ashram, in another conversation. An American, who had been living there for six months, calls himself Yuddhistra, and when he meets a FOB American in the ashram who introduces herself as "Joanie", he shouts in disbelief and says "That's really far out" and, along with other disciples, mocks her name. Everyone laughs with glee. It's in little scenes like these that the simple skill of Mehta's writing becomes obvious; how she makes her point about arrogance, the plastic pseudo-enlightenment that at one moment sees everything as "beautiful" and in another is perfectly capable of hilariously catty ignorance - all without saying anything.

But even her sadhus are not exempt from criticism. The Englishman who was so disenchanted with the East, he ends up drinking a sadhu's urine (that was supposedly so holy that it converts into scented rosewater). "It tasted remarkable like ordinary urine," he said. I laughed because it was obviously funny but the humour is masking something: 1) how far to push the limits, and 2) when we get to the edge, who is to blame? The disenchanted aristocrat or the sadhu trickster, whose practice in a remote village hardly met with visitors from outside? (A scene of Indian devotees cheering on an ex-oppressor to drink the contents of the cup, seemed to me - although I must admit I tried hard to steer away from such interpretations - a morbid but hilarious reversal of roles. Revenge is sweet - or, in this case, salty.) On one hand is an attempt - genuine or curious, to give them the benefit of the doubt - to seek mukhti (release, nirvana) and on the other is a man who has every right to be tricky. Hinduism is a manifold religion, the perfect spiritual mirror to India itself, not unlike Samkara's, an Indian philosopher, idea of Brahman of which he says 'What you say of it, the opposite is also true.' Sadhus are not strict, stern puritans - they are entitled to have some fun, too, just because they can. In Benares, an American exhausted by the urges of his libido, consults a sadhu to assist him in seeking sexual liberation.

"The naked fakir revealed himself in the phallus rampant. The sadhu applied an ash-covered left hand to its relief and discoursed on.
'Are you perhaps from America? I have noticed that such things are an obsession in that country. But do not worry. Yours is not a rare condition. The world over people are enslaved by sex. This enslavements leads to your childish complaints. See the excited condition of my body. See the motions of my left hand. Yet I can sit here calmly, concentrating on your problems.' "

How serious is the sadhu or is he having some fun at the American tourist's expense, or is this a strange idiosyncratic mix of the two? (Mostly the latter, I think.) This is a question that begets asking, and one that, incidentally, Mehta does not answer despite raising it many times. An entire section called "Sex and the Singles Guru" and some of "Forked Tongues" explored the somewhat dubious nature of sadhus who play off their divine image and insist on knowing the specific mantra to every problem. It is hard to give a definite answer, I realized, or draw the lines separating fact from fiction and fiction from fantasy. Inside and outside, self and the other: these boundaries are confused and confusing; their perimeters are hardly ever static, and how the book brings out these tensions is exciting.

The experience of reading this book is something like that realization you get in college about an aunt; specifically, the sari-clad aunt in some lucky families family, sort of edgy but serious, witty but not without sarcasm; the one who has a lesson for every occasion, and the one you had some suspicions about (was she imprisoned? did she smoke up? what is her dark secret?) until you grow up and once day realize suddenly the hidden but nuanced references in her stories; by this time, you're already in college and she, divorced, is half the globe away so all you can do is punch the air and say, "I knew it!!"