By harnessing the power of the platitude, guru-for-hire Deepak Chopra has lightened the wallets of bored housewives for over a decade. But a charlatan he is not.
Indeed, his admirers fervently believe that he possesses supernatural sensitivities, and this seems beyond dispute: along with being able to put a lively audience into a deep sleep in less than 10 minutes, he can smell money at a thousand yards and can distinguish between American Express and Visa even with a nose-cold.
Using mind-over-matter techniques of relaxation and transcendental denial he has convinced the West that India is a lotus-carpeted nirvana lousy with enlightenment and oozing tranquillity, rather than a 50-year-old motorbike carrying a billion people, a cow, and some suitcases during rush hour.
Perhaps the matrons of Montana and Michigan are wising up, or maybe Deepak has simply run out of mystical ways to describe brushing teeth and making toast. Whatever the case, there’s a smell of desperation about his latest book — it seems a guru shall not live by caviar alone — and the only aura around Golf for Enlightenment is the glint of a rented tanning-bed off a Rolex.
Golf coaches do talk an awful lot of rot. I was once told by a ferociously hairy homunculus on a swampy North Carolina fairway to “pitcher yer swangin’ yer clurb at a terrapin”.
It was never made clear why one would want to bludgeon a turtle with a nine iron, but that was his schtick and it worked for him. However, even the most glib pro would draw the line at advice like “Find the now and you’ll find the shot,” a
chapter that explains in 15 000 words how to keep your head over the ball and swing through the line.
At this rate tournaments could last months as players glide off into the woods to find the now, or desperately jet off to Bhutan to consult their swamis when the now has become now and then and is threatening to become entirely then.
Technicalities would be nightmarish: can caddies be dispatched to find the now? Is a penalty enforced if the now is found out of bounds? Oi veh.
However, if the now has been misplaced somewhere one can simply ask the ball for directions, for according to another interminable chapter, “The ball knows everything”.
Hegelian philosophy, all the lyrics to The Phantom of the Opera, how to make a delicious flan — those inscrutable little Pings have known all of it all along.
Suspicious minds might wonder why balls can’t get themselves out of water hazards more frequently, but Deepak does not go so far as to suggest that they have opposable thumbs, so there they stay, brooding and omniscient down in the muck.
It all has something to do with the Tree of Knowledge that caused Adam and Eve to be become the world’s first squatters. The chapter entitled “Playing in the Garden of Eden” disappointingly does not endorse nude co-ed golfing romps but instead bangs on about the philosophy of gardening.
It seems that golf courses are our sad attempts to recreate Eden, which apparently had lots of bunkers all over it (tended by archangels with flaming rakes), and a sprinkler system that came on at five every morning.
If balls represent the apple, then the serpent is surely the furtive biped who emerges sodden from reeds and canals and drains along one’s way, clutching five muddy chipped orbs (either balls or crocodile eggs, one can’t tell) that can be yours for just R5 each.
With three of your original five balls already deep in meditation at the bottom of ponds, and six holes remaining, the offer is tempting; but the sign at the clubhouse promises immediate expulsion to anyone caught partaking of these soggy bargains…
Deepak might have got away with it, splashing his insipid watercolour prose about with enough generalisations to escape being busted; but it all comes to a crashing halt with a little subheading tucked away between the Zen and the now: “You Can Master This Game”.
Sure, we can master this game, but can Deepak? His absence from the PGA top earners’ list suggests that you don’t have to wear a string vest and a ratty John Deere baseball cap to be an ignorant yokel yelling advice at the pros from the sidelines.