Meditate on this: birdie num num

Every time I watch The Party I am reminded of Deepak Chopra.

Yes, that movie.  Not politically correct anymore to even mention those kinds of movies in which white people darkened their faces in order to play the roles of dark-skinned characters whose actions were the triggers for slapstick comedy.  But, hey, at the end of it all, it is that character who gets the girl!

Ah, I digress.  So, what's new! ;)

Yes, Peter Sellers:

source

Am not sure if Deepak Chopra plays the sitar.

Source

Oops, sorry, that was Mike Myers ;)

Ok, kidding aside, whenever I come across a reference to Chopra, it is Sellers' Hrundi Bakshi that I immediately think about.  Which is what happened even as I started reading the opening paragraph in this New Yorker piece:

Last month, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Deepak Chopra described the usefulness of meditation for people on Wall Street. Speaking about a friend who manages a hedge fund, he said, “His entire staff meditates. I know many others now on Wall Street that we teach, actually. It makes them much more productive, because they’re centered, they’re not distracted.” Chopra was appearing on TV to promote a free twenty-one-day online meditation course that he offers with Oprah. Its theme is “Manifesting True Success.”

Chopra is a living example to prove PT Barnum's wise words that there is a sucker born every minute.  And Chopra knows how to get all the money that sucker has got!

Chopra is a lot more damaging caricature of Indians than was Bakshi.  This charlatan peddles crap and there are people ready to pay him top dollars for it.  Meditation as a way to make money?  Meditation was for anything but material benefits, and this television evangelist warps the idea.  I imagine that Chopra's next stop will be at the Pentagon in order to sell meditation as the path towards a lot more effective killing and destruction!

But, the New Yorker offers more, which is why I pay my damn money and have subscribed to it for years.

American capitalism has had a long and durable romance with Eastern spirituality, and the latter has hardly undermined the former. For well over a century, business-minded Americans have been transforming Hindu and Buddhist contemplative practices into an unlikely prosperity gospel.

The essay is not about Chopra but about how American capitalism has played on the PT Barnum approach for the longest time.  Chopra is merely one of the latest additions.  My favorite example from there is the following:

Consider the work of Yogi Ramacharaka, whose popular and influential books included “The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath” (1903) and “Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism” (1904). Writing in Advanced Thought, a New Thought magazine, Ramacharaka emphasized that his ideas coincided with those of its editor, William Walter Atkinson. “The editor of this magazine has frequently told you that the Touchstone of any teaching is this: ‘Does this make me Stronger, Better and More Efficient?’ I cheerfully support him in this statement, for the same truth is given (in other words) in the best Hindu teachings—in fact, as he, himself, would freely admit, he obtained the idea from such sources.”

And then comes the punchline:

Its not surprising that Atkinson and Ramacharaka claimed the same Hindu sources, because they were, in fact, the same person. Ramacharaka was one of Atkinson’s several noms de plume, and, as the historian Carl T. Jackson points out, Atkinson was “by no means the only New Thought writer to masquerade as an Oriental teacher or to offer an ‘authentic’ course in Eastern wisdom.”

 Suckers after suckers born every minute.

“With business meditation, we have a practice that is extrapolated from Buddhism and secularized so that all of the theological underpinnings are swept away,” Catherine Albanese, the author of “A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion,” says. “So we have Buddhism stood on its head. Mindfulness meditation has been brought into the service of a totally different perspective and world view.” By now, that’s part of a venerable American tradition.

I am the real sucker, in the American sense.  Instead of living a hermit life in my ashram by the river, I ought to be monetizing my half-baked understandings.  Hey Hrundi, any suggestions for me?

The conservative Indian-Americans

I am not sure whether there has been any systematic polling done on the political leanings of Indian-Americans--the naturalized and the natural-born.  I would not be surprised if it shows a near even split.

For instance, the politics of Bobby Jindal in New Orleans and Nikki Hawley in South Carolina are not only Republican but with a good chunk of social and religious conservatism as well.  The conservative commentators Ramesh Ponnuru and Dinesh D'Souza also share that social/religious conservatism.

But, it appears that recently D'Souza has swung even further right with his weird psychoanalysis of Obama's politics; what happened to him?

Here is Shikha Dalmia--another Indian-American--writing about D'Souza's thesis (in, of all places, her regular column in Forbes, which had given D'Souza the cover-story privilege!):

What is even more unsettling than D’Souza’s unsubstantiated ideological accusations against Obama are his gratuitous digs at polygamy in Obama’s family. He plays this up repeatedly. What is the point of this except to remind Americans that Obama is a Muslim – the most dreaded of “others”? Ultimately, D’Souza’s rumination reveals less about how Obama thinks and more about how D’Souza thinks. It shows not that Obama is motivated by malice toward America, but D’Souza is motivated by malice toward Obama. How pathetic.

From an an essay that comes across as a little too calm for the usually volcanic Christopher Hitchens comes this note:

For Dinesh D'Souza to label Obama the equivalent of a Kenyan Mau Mau was one thing, but for former Speaker Newt Gingrich to endorse the analysis with such dispatch was quite another. What will they do for an encore?

 Salon has the best place for D'Souza's rant: This week in crazy

His newest, "The Roots of Obama's Rage," is the story of Dinesh D'Souza flailing to find a new and unique way of making a moderate pragmatic Democrat sound like a horrible monster bent on the destruction of America and enslavement of its people. He's recreating the nation in the image of his "philandering, inebriated African socialist" father. He is stealing America's wealth and redistributing it to third-world nations. Sources include, in addition to Obama's memoir about the absence of his father from his life, one obscure paper Obama Sr. wrote, and also something one of Obama's grandmothers said, once.

D'Souza's embarrassing history should've led this book straight to the remainder bin. Instead it made the cover of Forbes. Then Newt Gingrich endorsed it. Then Glenn Beck endorsed it. The book immediately climbed up the Amazon bestseller list.

Now the White House is involved, with Robert Gibbs asking Forbes to retract the numerous factual inaccuracies. All Forbes will say is that facts don't apply in opinion pieces.

D'Souza is enjoying all the attention, of course.

Ahem, time for me to admit that there are some crazy Indian-Americans, too :)

Speaking of crazy Indian-Americans, nobody better than Peter Sellers' Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party:)

The chicanery of Deepak Chopra

Let us face it; Peter Sellers as the Indian, Hrundi V. Bakshi, in The Party, offers a lot more wisdom than does Deepak Chopra through his highfalutin new age spiritual advice, where he seemingly blends modern science and reason with age old lore.

And the guy, Chopra that is, has an inflated opinion of himself enough to tweet a horribly failed joke that an earthquake in Southern California was a result of his meditation; he tweeted:
"Had a powerful meditation just now -- caused an earthquake in Southern California" ... "Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake. Sorry about that."

Perhaps all Chopra does is to test and confirm on a daily basis P.T. Barnum's line about suckers being born everyday.

Chopra's convenient mixing of scientific language and spiritual crap gets Michael Shermer's attention (ht).  The following line in his commentary about Chopra's version of "Theology 2.0," as Shermer describes it, is a beauty:

Chopra’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience.

Awesome, dude!
Take it away, Claudine Longet :)