Word: indianness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...underpriced but rapidly appreciating in value: 17th century old master drawings and prints; Victorian furniture, paintings, drawings, porcelain, silver and antiques of all kinds; Japanese pottery and porcelain, ivory and enamels; Italian baroque paintings and Renaissance statuary; American primitives; Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities. Also upward bound are American Indian artifacts, antique gold watches, rare manuscripts, books and autographs, Victorian and Edwardian jewelry, and art deco furniture. It seems that nothing that can be collected is being neglected. Well, almost nothing. Among the few items that have not appreciably gained in value in recent years: Jacobean furniture and portraits...
Gita Mehta's witty documentary satire illustrates that the cost can be considerably higher. This is especially true for the thousands of Europeans and Americans who have flocked to the Indian subcontinent in search of enlightenment, cheap dope and, like the Californian who turned her sadhana into a course on "inner environments," opportunity. As reckoned by the Hindus and Gore Vidal, this dark, chaotic age of Kali seethes with confusions, corruption and misapprehension. Karma, for example, a rather severe concept of determinism, has been turned into a metaphysical jelly bean by hippies, shopping-center swamis and jet-lagged gurus...
Mehta, 36, is an Indian-born, Cambridge-educated former teacher of Greek tragedy. She has clarifying things to say about those who think that life is a bed of roses and those who believe it is a bed of nails: "For us [Hindus], eternal life is death-not in the bosom of Jesus-but just death, no more being born again to endure life again to die again. Yet people come in ever-increasing numbers to India to be born again with the conviction that in their rebirth they will relearn to live. At the heart of all our celebrations...
...East not only accommodates Western delusions but also compliments them with imitation. There are the lyrics of a popular Indian song inspired by a movie that found God in a hash pipe: "Take a drag. Take a drag. I'm wiped out./ Say it in the morning. Say it in the evening./ Hare Krishna Hare Rama Hare Krishna Hare Rama." There are also Western notions on better transcendence through chemistry. Mehta notes that young foreigners frequently sell their passports to buy drugs; the documents are reported stolen and easily replaced at local embassies. She also reports that villagers...
...spirit trade; a multinational convocation of celibates meets in Delhi under the motto ROYALTY is PURITY PLUS PERSONALITY; downtown, hundreds of Children of God are demonstrating for the principle of making love for Jesus. A California touch therapist attends a session in an ashram only to discover that his Indian counterparts use 2-ft.-long clubs. The visitor emerges with a broken arm. At a Delhi football stadium the followers of one guru await the miraculous proof of God from their master. His evidence: "God exists because if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary under the letter...