Re: Eat, Pray, Love
Date: September 05, 2010 09:54PM
Id say, before reading Eat Pay Love, get and read Karma Cola:The Marketing of the Mystic East by Gita Mehta.
The other day, I thought, 'Maybe, just maybe, the dream of there being a Some Place Else, is the one thing that keeps people alive, until perhaps they hang on long enough to find out there actually is no magic place and that, to quote Flip Wilson's Church of What's Happening Now, what you see,right here, right now, is what you get.
The folks in AA talk about 'pulling a geographic' --the very common belief that if one just moves to another city, ones addiction will be solved, just doesnt work.
Its not wrong to go to India. Its not even wrong to go if one actually has the funds and health, and is not messing up pre-exiting relationships in order to go there.
But its another thing for an entire marketing machine to orchestrate a dream machine
and make it seem anyone can do it, while hiding all the strategizing and making it seem this person is Just Like Us when in very many ways, she is a member of an elite, and had a financial safety net beneath her during her time in India.
Gita Mehta's book has some searing descriptions from an embassy physician and from an official from the French Embassy of what happened to many, many non wealthy and obcure persons who thronged to India on the years of the Hippie Trail and who had to be flown home under the supervision of that physician.
And for a yet more horrifying description of what happened to one woman who had dreams, get and read Serpent Rising by Mary Garden.
She wrote how she visited guru after guru, and saw what seemed like disguised harems. She noted that the few female gurus she met didnt have harems but spent much of their time eating--and too much.
Garden learned it the hard way. She had been part of a guru's harem and when she became pregnant by him(he claimed he could not make her pregnant due to his spiritual powers), he went into a hideous rage, blamed her, said the ashram was 'no place for a screaming baby.'
(My reading is the guru himself was a jealous baby, unable to share attention or give adult nurture to a child. Any competation was hated. He was in an adults body, with a
2 year old mindset and the dangerous social skills of charismatic sexual and spiritual con artist--the very worst thing for any of us to trust)
Garden had to get an abortion and she was jeered at as a slut and prostitute while
suffering alone, bleeding and tied to a bed in a clinic.
All that and it took more and yet more time for her to wake up. This guru had recruiters they tried to get her to return, even after she was home in Australia.
And she went home ill, wrecked and with parents who loved her and had spent years
worried sick.
Mary Garden and Gita Mehta's books were not made into movies and were not supported by a PR machine.