Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream by Deepak Chopra, Sanjiv Chopra

school was the elite option in India in the Fifties; if cricket flannels were an anomaly in the tropics, what about knee socks, a green blazer, and a school tie? Wherever we lived at the time, I threw on a uniform every morning before catching the six-thirty bus across Delhi, or walking up the hill past tea plantations in Shillong, or kissing my mother good-bye in Jabalpur. The religious aspect was never raised at home. My father was intent solely on giving his sons the best education. He had received a good one himself, but it took an act of noblesse oblige from Lord Mountbatten to grease the rails for him. Fortune had favored him extravagantly. My father didn’t want to take any risks with us. Everyone knew that the best education came from Jesuit schools run by the Christian Brothers, sohe enrolled us in one such school after another as we moved to each new post: St. Aloysius, St. Edmund’s, St. Columba’s. These weren’t just saints’ names. They were tickets for the first-class compartment that rolled toward our future.
    In my whole life I can remember only two crushing humiliations. The second occurred in medical school, years later. The first took place in Shillong, one of the beautiful colonialist hill stations in the state of Assam. This was a landscape green and cool enough to make a sergeant major’s wife shed a tear for Shropshire and Kent. The station sat at five thousand feet, the rumpled earth around it anticipating the leap to the Himalayas stretching away to the north. Every morning, I walked to a school on a hill, St. Edmund’s, with fragrant tea plantations spreading a carpet of soft foliage as far as the eye could see.
    The only serpent in this Eden was that St. Edmund’s was a much harder school than the one I had attended previously in Jabalpur. Every month, the principal handed out report cards in a formal ceremony, the boys lined up in order of merit. The highest you could receive was a gold card, which only went to one or two boys. If you got one, the principal would shake your hand warmly and invite you for tea and a movie. For a blue card he might shake your hand and give you a friendly hug. A pink card would be handed over with a neutral expression. If you had sunk so low as to deserve a yellow card, the principal would look away disdainfully as he thrust it at you. It was a devastatingly effective way to indoctrinate the boys, and I couldn’t bear the idea of getting anything less than a blue or gold card. I sweated to earn one, but after the first month, I suffered the agony of watching every other boy march up for his handshake until I was presented with a yellow card and that disdainful look.
    To weep uncontrollably when you are eleven years old seems poignant from the distant perspective of an adult. At the time, though, it collapses your world. I thought the humiliation would stay with me for life, and the point isn’t that I was wrong. Just thinking that I was forever scarred is what burned the humiliation in. I indulged in melodrama alone in my room. Jesus had stumbled on the way to Calvary, and now so had I. Before, I had blazed a trail of glory. Approval wasthe air I breathed, and of course it was impossible for me to see that my trail had been littered with vanity, greed, and fear. Aren’t they the common coin in school when you consider the dark side?
    The dark side of life may be universal, but it doesn’t affect everyone the same. You may curse it for ruining your future or feel a kind of grudging gratitude—for lessons imparted or for greater dangers that were warded off. I’m sure that some of my classmates grew up deeply resenting the pressure that was put on them from Western Christian values. Years later, when I read George Orwell’s essays, I came across a dismal opinion. Orwell wrote that the worst advertisement for Christianity is its adherents. This wasn’t true when I was at school. I never personally experienced the abuse that has come to light among