Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez.
Good news for spiritually challenged South Africans – the founder of the Chopra Foundation, Deepak Chopra, was in town this week, dispensing wisdom in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, as he discoursed on “wellbeing”, this season’s topic of choice.
Possibly profound, possibly nebulous, wellbeing is one of those ideas about which the good doctor – described variously as a philosopher, a controversialist and a New Age guru – feels is vital to our future health, as he jets south to put his figurative stethoscope to the nation’s emotional and spiritual pulse.
Backed by Gallup research in the United States, Chopra says every nation has a kind of wellbeing threshold. South Africa’s was going down “but is beginning to slowly go up”.
We have reason to be alarmed, he says mildly in an interview earlier this week. Should our wellbeing status climb beyond the point of no return, we will be in the desperate straits of the terminally ill – physical and mental illness going hand in hand. “The fact that the minority are prospering doesn’t speak well for the future,” he says.
There are various signifiers of wellbeing, whether they be infant mortality, accidents on the road or one’s ability to walk safely at night.
Sociologists might call this something else but for Chopra it tells us important things about what a nation is and whether it is heading for the cul-de-sac or the fourlane superhighway.
From what I understand, he and his disciples would like to see a global wellbeing roll-out, where wellbeing, rather than, say, trade deficits or carbon emissions, is the point around which politicians, citizens and academics coalesce.
“We’re going to have to look at a global effort on wellbeing rather than discussing things like GDP [gross domestic product],” he says with winning self-assurance, while you wonder if a wellbeing clinic might perhaps spring up on every street corner like a fried chicken outlet.
Unlike his glossy posters
In real life, Chopra (67) is unlike his glossy posters, from which he stares with unusually large, almost pleading, eyes. Sitting in a high-backed chair at the Michelangelo Hotel in Sandton, he looks smaller, slouchier, teetering almost on the threshold of boredom. He is casually dressed in T-shirt and red trainers, with a pair of diamond-encrusted glasses perched on a wide face. This reminds me of the pianist and entertainer Liberace but it is Chopra’s single concession to vanity or a moment of levity in the high-stakes rolling of the soul.
Perhaps the analogy is not too far-flung. Like Liberace, Chopra plays soft tunes on the nation’s piano. The wellbeing melody (the trip to South Africa is part of the Future of Wellbeing tour) seems frighteningly well-chosen. What with the lights going out and the rage on our roads, we’re in a state of dampened, poorly disguised national anguish. Almost any song will soothe.
This seems a slight but discernible departure from some of Chopra’s mantras during the greedy 1980s and 1990s when acquisitiveness was championed without apology.
“People who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual,” he wrote in one of his more than 70 books (translated into over 85 languages) back then, books that have helped to make him exceptionally wealthy. “Affluence is simply our natural state.”
This week’s shows helped the wellbeing of his bank account. Tickets at his Jo’burg shows at the Emperor’s Palace casino cost R699 (explorer class), R1 499 (guru class) and R2 999 (enlightened class). According to his website, the different classes gave followers “general access and seating” (explorer). For R800 more, a guru ticket gave you “VIP access and seating and The Future of Wellbeing work book”, and if you were willing to fork out R1 500 more, “exclusive access and upfront seating, The Future of Wellbeing workbook, an autographed Deepak Chopra book, plus meeting and cocktail snacks with Deepak Chopra!!”
At this week’s pre-show interviews, journalists and camera crews were told by his local PR agency that their audience with him could last only five minutes and they had to mail their questions in beforehand.
I’m one of the last interviewers and he looks tired, possibly rendered a little unwell by the constant traffic of inane questions about wellbeing.
Skin colour
This is his fourth trip to South Africa, he says. He can’t remember exactly but he thinks he was here in the 1970s, during the reign of PW Botha. He touches his forearm delicately to suggest his skin colour was a problem back then.
We talk about wellbeing and he outlines the wellbeing programme.
Finally, I ask about his engagement at the Inanda heritage site later in the week, where Mahatma Gandhi is said to have pioneered his ideas about passive resistance. He seems momentarily taken aback by the question, then recovers his poise, giving a careful answer about the site’s spiritual and religious significance.
As befits radiant men of magic, Chopra is surrounded by a posse of helpers and acolytes. He was brought to South Africa this time by a group of Durban educationists and textbook publishers, Oval International.
One of their directors, Pravin Maharaj and his wife visited Chopra’s Californian crib – called the Chopra Centre for Wellbeing in La Jolla, it is dubbed “Shangri La-Jolla” by sceptics – and were impressed. He won a raffle during his first visit and that took him back a second time. While there, he and his wife were invited to sit in a circle with other devotees and encouraged to look into the eyes of the person closest, an exercise called “the eye of the window”.
“You looked at the person opposite and you just saw the face of the universe looking back at you,” said Maharaj, looking me straight in the eyes.
It seems that Durban and its confines are most predisposed to Chopra’s message. The take-up there for his show is better than it has been in Johannesburg and Cape Town. This might be because of the region’s bigger presence of Hinduism but could be because Chopra’s visit has been better publicised. There has been help from the city council, KwaZulu-Natal Tourism and the King Shaka International Airport, among others.
Some seats at Chopra’s Durban show on Thursday were sponsored by Oval International, which made an effort to be sensitive to small business and sponsored a large group of nongovernmental organisations.
Cleaner than India
Chopra likens Durban to India, although he says – again, just the hint of a smile – he likes it better than India because it is cleaner.
It is symbolically significant that Durban should embrace Chopra because it is a kind of geographical, cultural and spiritual crossroads, where East melts imperceptibly into West. Chopra himself has done much the same thing, realising that his status as a New Delhi-born Indian gave him access to Eastern wisdom and mysticism in a way that was far more attractive and potentially lucrative to the West than his status as a Harvard-trained endocrinologist.
“Chopra’s transformation from an obscure salesman of alternative potions to a national guru can be dated precisely to Monday, July 12 1993, when he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to promote his book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,” writes sceptic and critic Francis Wheen in How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. “His revelation that ‘love is the ultimate truth’ was perfectly pitched for Oprah and her millions of fretful yet hopeful viewers. Within 24 hours of the broadcast, 137 000 copies of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind had been ordered and Chopra’s publishers – the deliciously named Harmony Books – were reprinting round the clock.”
It is fair to say that business has probably slowed. We live in less rampantly confident times. And who are we to blow against the wind, as singer Bob Dylan once asked. Chopra’s message, his ability to offer consolation and wisdom, to heal wounds and soften pain, has acted as spiritual balm to the desperate, the needy and the afflicted. The logic of the market shows that wherever there is demand, there must surely be supply. Doctor Chopra has done just that.
Deepak Chopra will speak in Cape Town on Saturday at 3pm at the International Convention Centre