Author Description

From the Introduction... Among the letters I have received from readers of Karma Cola, the one that continues to haunt me was written by a young woman incarcerated in a home for the insane in the United States. The writer described herself as having been among the hundreds of thousands of Westerners who traveled to India in the belief that they would find holy men able to free them from the boredom and despair of an increasingly material world. Soon after her arrival, while walking down an Indian street, the young woman encountered a man clothed in the saffron robes of renunciation who offered to be her spiritual mentor. Delighted that enlightenment was already within her reach she became his follower, following him even into a cave in the high Himalayas where, she was told, other spiritual gurus were waiting to initiate her in the ways of Eastern mysticism. Then her initiation began. The gurus gave her food laced with drugs. When she was incapacitated, they sexually assaulted her. For weeks she was kept a drugged sexual prisoner by her teachers, until she managed to escape and find her way back to the United States--where she was promptly hospitalized as mad. Now she was in the process of securing her release from hospital, able at last to laugh at herself. "Because," she wrote, "after reading your book I realized I should never have trusted gurus who wore Adidas running shoes."