Reviews for Karma cola

The average rating for Karma cola based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-07 00:00:00 Ian Quigley I had always romanticized the hippie culture, their magic bus and the trail the counterculture activists took and often wondered what happened to the hippies who made it to India. I found unexpected answers in Gita Mehta’s Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East which is about the millions of westerners who flooded to India in the 60s and 70s. As an Indian who had lived in the US and UK, the author looked on perplexed as the nirvana hunters plummeted headlong into addictions and devotion for bogus gurus who in reality were probably capable of teaching them a lesson or two about materialism. Con men were aplenty in India back then and they readily catered to the western fantasies of a mystic East. The book is a string of humorous, mind-boggling and oftentimes painful anecdotes about these hippies who in their psychedelic state of mind fended for themselves in shady shacks if they couldn’t afford the substantial amounts ashrams levied to sell them the enlightenment they sought for so badly. According to the author, their plight was such that, in order to hold onto their lifestyle, many sold their passports in the black-market and in their naivety, allowed themselves to be physically, emotionally, and sexually abused as they awaited spiritual enlightenment. Mehta’s choice of words and the usage of satire makes the book an interesting read. I’m yet to come across another book of this sort and am glad that an Indian perspective of the madness of those times has been documented.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-04-11 00:00:00 Sabrina Griswold Gita Mehta's Karma Cola, originally published in 1980, is a collection of anecdotes about the Western travelers that Mehta met in India in the 1970s. A westward-looking Indian (Cambridge-educated), Mehta views young spiritual seekers with a combination of amusement and dismay. She highlights the absurdity that people looking for enlightenment and truth are falling for the rhetoric of gurus teaching such blatantly irrational doctrines. Whether it is some Europeans worshipping a candy-eating five year old as God or overlooking their guru's use of disciples for sex, you'll be amazed just what silliness was going on in ashrams for foreigners. And while many chronicles of the overland trail of the 1960s and 1970s make mention only of travelers' love of hashish, Mehta shows the disturbing rise in the use of heroin among them and the awful effects on people who got strung out and stranded, either being flown back home at government expense or just dying in the streets. Unfortunately, Karma Cola is not written as any sort of coherent history. Mehta's anecdotes are often interesting reading, but I soon got fed up with the lack of any dates or clear statistical detail in her discussion of India under tourist onslaught. Perhaps this book is ideal for people who have read Mehta's other works, but for readers simply interested in the history of the hippie trail I cannot recommend this.