By Meenakshi Kumar
His cosy little basement office is lined with rows and rows of books, mostly on religion and spirituality; photographs of the Dalai Lama share a comfortable space all over with those of Ramakrishna Paramhansa’s and yet, filmmaker Rajiv Mehrotra prefers to call himself an “undeserving spiritual aspirant”.
Whether he is one or not, is best left for the spiritual masters to decide, whom he has tried to understand in his to-be-released book, The Mind Of The Guru (Penguin India). The book, as he says, is a part of his personal journey, a journey which began immediately after he returned from Oxford and spent time at Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh. Since then there has been no looking back as he moved from one spiritual plane to another, all the while looking for answers to elusive questions.
The book, is thus, a search for these answers which took him to spiritual gurus such as Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Deepak Chopra, Desmond Tutu, Swami Agnivesh, Aga Khan among others. The book comprises their individual interviews, collected over a period of time.
“Language was a major constraint and I had to limit myself to gurus who knew English,” says Mehrotra regretfully. “But I enjoyed meeting each one of them.” As it is an ongoing journey, Mehrotra is already halfway through his second book, Spirit Of The Muse, which will be a journey into the mind of a creative person’s mind. And his third book, still to begin, will be on the Dalai Lama, his root guru. “I’ll try and document the contemporary actions and analysis of the Dalai Lama. Unfortunately, nobody has done that so far,” he says.
After the successful series on Ramakrishna Paramhans that he made for Doordarshan sometime back, he will now focus on Swami Vivekananda. “I want to explore who the real Swami Vivekananda is. The series will also try to find out what remains of the Parliament of World Religions,” explains the managing trustee of The Public Service Broadcasting Trust.
And in between, he wouldn’t mind continuing on his spiritual journey, this time perhaps to the Himalayan caves.
