New Age Therapies

No doubt the New Age has spawned therapies, diets, ways of life, spiritual searches and all that even the most diehard rationalists can’t scoff at anymore. The distinguishing feature of our age is that we’re all learning to accommodate a wide range of ‘philosophies’ that are spouted by everyone from seer to starlet. If at one time going in for ‘alternative’ medicine meant eschewing aspirin and chewing tulsi instead, today it can mean anything from murmuring, to body-tapping, to staring at coloured bottles, to chanting, to deep-breathing, your way to health and wealth.

Those of us who’re not urgently urging some new quest or path on to anyone else, have learnt to more or less leave each other to doing their own thing. One man’s paper weight is another person’s healing crystal, so to speak.

However, all this live-and-let-live glow kind of evaporates for me when I’m around the denizens of Bollywood. That place is bizzaro land indeed. The rapidity with which they run through newer and newer mind-body fads is mind-boggling. A few years ago it was Reiki and Feng Shui and Vaastu. Now that’s old, old hat. Too staid, too common, too mainstream even. It’s for the rest-of-India now. Let’s see – what baffling new concepts have I met over the last few years? They come and go so fast, they’re difficult to document. Many never make it up the ghats to wannabe Pune, but some do.

Some of my best friends work in Bollywood, so I get to see the new stuff up close and personal. Some time back there was that weird chappati-like mushroom that was doing the rounds. Ever been gifted one of those? It’s fascinating, where these things suddenly show up from. One fine day, your friends in Bollywood will tell you with all the zeal of the new convert: "You got to try this, I tell you; it cured my insomnia/gout/infidelity/acidity/obesity etc, etc." Saying this, he or she gives you a plastic container, with a black-tea like liquid, on which floats what looks like a 6-day old chappati. This is some mushroom, whose water you just must drink, for life as you know it to change. And that’s not all. You must nurture said mushroom lovingly, with fresh feeds of mineral water, so that 10 days later, it kind of gives birth (by simple subdivision like an amoeba) to another mushroom. And that one you must transfer carefully to another plastic container (never, ever, metal, remember) and pass on to someone else, thereby increasing the tribe of healthy and wealthy Mushroomites. And never break the sequence. Keep passing on the goodness. It’s the chain letter of health fads, in a way. Amazing that they’ll drink this gunk in the day, but insist on only Blue Label in the night.

The next time you meet them, however, the mushroom is nowhere in sight. You ask them about it and they’ll dismiss it with: "Naah, that thing was baaad. It gave me depression". This is what really saved me, they’ll say, pointing to what looks like several random cotton blobs stuck to their ceilings and sundry spots at their entrance way. "You eating cotton now?" you venture to ask, and they’ll laugh airily and say: "No, silly. This is the stuff that absorbs all the negative energy." Apparently there is a new flavour-of-the-month lady who goes around identifying where all the good stuff comes in from and where it leaks out from, and for a fat fee, she will show you precisely where to hang these blobs. So suddenly, your designer-chic apartment entrance looks like a kid went a bit mad with his craft project and glue and cotton somehow reached even the ceiling. Next time you visit, though, mercifully, you can be very sure that there will be no namonishaan of these blobs.

Nowadays, when I visit people like this, I often can’t figure out if their house entrance has been vanadalized by someone – you see several large gashes/scratches on the doorway – or whether this is some new way to stave off bad energy (no one uses the word ‘evil’ anymore – it’s all about bad/negative energy). Inside, at the entrance, where your favourite old lamp hung, there could be a shelf with a series of coloured liquid filled bottles. The khoj for peace and health and wealth has come to an end, they declare. They have found their healing colours, and life is a peach. For the next few weeks, at least, you say to yourself….And so it goes on. This touching hope and faith that all the answers lie outside and not within!

When we were kids, we had an amusing poem about where all the things that get lost go. Pins, and pens, and clips and hankies…the poet guessed that there was some alternate world into which they all vanished. Same thing with the props of modern-day spiritual and health pursuits. Where do all the floating mushrooms, tummy-trimmers, tantra-mantra-yantras, crystals, green-tea capsules, and hundreds of other things go, once these people have dumped them? Someone ought to collect them and put up a Museum of Self-deception. Or perhaps bury them in a time capsule so that later generations can find them and marvel at our madness.