“Coming back to Perfect Health, the book that I was perusing, it claimed that ‘aging is a mistake’”
Any mention of Deepak Chopra – the physician, writer, public speaker, alternate medicine campaigner and a prominent figure in the New Age movement – generates an extreme reaction. With the general public, that is. They either love and revere him as the greatest mind/body healer on the planet, or hate and dismiss him off as an arrogantly obstinate and mumbo-jumbo spouting quack.
Having witnessed both the responses at close quarters, I am undecided about reading his book, called Perfect Health, when I come across it in my bookshelf. I have no idea how it got there because I do not remember buying it.
The mystery is solved as soon as I notice my mother’s handwritten message on the first page itself. She has also put a date there, and I realize belatedly that the book has been sitting on my bookcase for 20 years already.
My mum was fond of the author because her maiden surname was the same as his and, even though she had never met him in person, she could trace their ancestry through the family-tree to the same small town in North India.
There were a few other Chopras too, who worked in the Indian film industry, and we were made to watch their movies. Regularly! Also, if the film was a hit, there were celebrations in my house, without the common surnamed film stars having the faintest of knowledge about it.
All these thoughts went through my head as I studied my mother’s handwriting closely. With a jolt, I realized that I had started to slant certain letters of the English alphabet in the same way as she did. Was that an inherited genetic trait too?
Meanwhile, I recalled attending Deepak Chopra’s daughter Mallika’s talk (she is a celebrated author and businesswoman herself) and noticed that she had also mastered her father’s art.
During the discussion, she disclosed that when she was nine years old, her father would ask her to repeat the following words every day: “I am responsible for what I see, I choose the feelings I experience and set the goals that I will achieve; and everything that seems to happen to me, I ask for and receive as I have asked.”
Now, compared to this when I was that age, my father never instructed me to do anything other than stop quarrelling with my two brothers. And in his thoughtful moments, he advised us to eat everything that was served on our plate and taught us to be polite and respectful towards everyone. That was pretty much all.
It is no wonder that I did not have a clue about a novel process called ‘quantum healing for the mind and body’ that Dr Chopra had discovered and passed on to his daughter.
Coming back to Perfect Health, the book that I was perusing, it claimed that ‘aging is a mistake’. Ignoring the first eight chapters, I went straight to this most interesting one. “Although everyone falls prey to the aging process, no one has ever proved that it is necessary”, was its opening line. I was hooked!
“Do we have to age?” I asked my husband in the evening.
“That is a trick question”, he said.
“Aging is a mistake of the intellect”, I read from the book.
“Whose intellect?’ he asked.
“Ours obviously”, I said.
“You are mistaken there”, he corrected.
I raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Your good doctor’s intellect”, he replied.
“Has permanently aged”, he told me.
