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The Rediff Interview/Deepak Chopra

'The soul is a confluence of the sacred and the profane'

Guess who is making a movie in India now? Pop philosopher and best-selling author Deepak Chopra is making a movie about an American assassin who comes to Mumbai to kill a politician and slowly finds himself trapped in his own moral dilemmas as well as bewildered by the love and faith of those around him. Evil versus innocence.

Dr Chopra in conversation with Pritish Nandy.

You speak so much about Hinduism. What is its essence as you understand it?

Creativity. The many ways to enlightenment. Its essential humility.

The fact that it does not make firm distinctions between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and bad?

Yes. The Semitic faiths know everything, whereas we believe we know nothing. Everything is open, creative, subject to interpretation. That is why unlike Islam, we are never in a fight-fight mode.

But surely, that is the quality of any young religion?

Yes. With all due respect to Mother Teresa and the great Christian missionaries, the kind of misery they sought to alleviate was only perpetuated because their idea of charity was all wrong. The Hindu idea of charity is to help somebody evolve into a higher level of self-sufficiency. Into enlightenment. The Hindu idea of dharma, artha, kama, moksha is complete in itself. And yet we were so influenced by the Christians for hundreds of years that we have imported their notions of charity.

Christian missionary charity. Charity that perpetuates the very misery it is supposed to alleviate because it creates a dependent beggar. We do not need such charity. We need our self-confidence.

How do you define self-confidence for a people, a nation?

It takes a long time for a fruit to ripen and then it drops very suddenly. This is what has been happening for the last four decades. Indians have been gradually getting to a level of power and self-confidence. Now suddenly they have a lot of political power and can influence big-time politics anywhere. In the US today, you will find very successful, very powerful Indians who are in a position to influence thought, policy, ideas.

Do you see that impacting India?

This (success) is creating a lot of self-esteem. Actually India never had a problem with self-esteem. But now what is happening is that this self-esteem is being reinforced by feedback. Germany has asked for 75,000 new brains from India this year. They have actually asked for Indians while they are restricting immigration for others. Such things reinforce our self-esteem.

Do you see the risk of a belligerent sense of self-esteem emerging?

Yes. But luckily I see no belligerence out there among the most successful Indians in Silicon Valley. Instead, I see humility to the utmost. That sets a very strong example. At a subtle level there is enormous creativity coming into play. Information technology is one example. Another is medical transcriptions. Someone gets the idea that let's do transcriptions for US medical offices in India. So Indian companies start doing that. What happens is that soon all medical transcriptions move to India. The doctor does his dictation in the evening and the next morning, thanks to our 12-hour time difference, he finds that all his records are ready and it has cost him less than a tenth of what he would have paid in the US.

It starts with making money. Making money from exploiting a foreign country with a lot of brain power. But, after a while, you become dependent. You find that without these people you cannot function any more. When that reaches a critical mass, you can start charging a lot more. We can charge five times what we are charging today and still get it. Once you have created the dependency, they have no choice but to come to you.

Do you see a difference in the way Indians work in India and the way they work overseas?

Inherently there is no difference. But the NRI is more fortunate. He is not worried about which politician to approach for what permission. He is not worried about getting a licence. He is not worried about waiting in a government office to get some permit. That is the difference. If we could unleash the power of the resident Indian, they would achieve exactly as much as the NRI has achieved.

I believe you are planning a television show for India?

I have had this idea of bringing together education, enlightenment and entertainment on one platform. A show that can change the face of television.

Do you think people sitting before the idiot box actually respond to original, innovative ideas? All research shows that they are simply doing what is popularly described as mindless 'timepass'. That is why most television is a no-brainer.

I would agree with you, Pritish, that television is totally mindless. But it depends. You can create some very interesting programming which makes people think. I do not want to be premature right now, but I am in dialogue with one of the largest media companies in the world to make a show that could be shown worldwide. Something that would encompass education, entertainment and lifestyle. I will use a three-pronged strategy encompassing television, the Internet and movies.

In fact, we are doing a feature film right now about an American assassin who comes to Bombay to kill a politician and has a crisis, which makes him undergo a major transformation. It is very dramatic and we are doing it in collaboration with an English production company called London Films.

What is the actual story?

It is a simple story. Of an assassin who comes in ready to do his heinous act. He is on a motorbike. He has to swerve to avoid a child and he fractures his leg. He does not want to go to the police. So when the kid's father invites him to the house, he promptly agrees. There, in order to entertain the kid, he starts telling him gangster stories about Chicago. The kid starts imagining those in mythological terms. So you have two versions, moving at two levels. One is about Chicago gangsters. The other is archetypal mythology. And, of course, you have a girl. The kid's sister, who gets drawn into the story because she is looking through a peephole. He tries to talk to her through his stories and she gets drawn in both sexually and romantically, not realising that he is evil.

She does realise that he is evil at a certain point in the film when this man sends the kid to put a bomb in a political rally. At that moment she figures him out and he has to confront her innocence. He is confused and does not know what to do. So he decides to go back to save the kid, which he does, but in the process gets killed. In a sense, he redeems himself.

What are you calling the film?

Juggernaut. Based on Jagannath. There is a lot of phantasmagoria in the movie.

Hindu mythology is often morally ambivalent. Are you going to bring that in? Or is the villain going to be just pure evil?

Psychological studies show that progressive proliferation of ambiguities is what creates the ground for creativity. The soul, more than anything else, is a confluence of the sacred and the profane. It is the confluence of contexts, meanings, themes. That is what Hindus believe in and that is why our world of experience is so rich, so enlightening.

The Rediff Interviews

Earlier interview:
'Americans are more at peace with themselves than Indians'

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