From Interstellar to Batman and Star Wars the venerable religion has been the driving philosophy behind many hit movies. Why? Nirpal Dhaliwal in The Guardian Interstellar’s box office total is $622,932,412 and counting. It is the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year and spawned an endless raft of think pieces testing the validity of its science and applauding the innovation of its philosophy. But it is not so new. The idea which propels the plot – there is a universal super-consciousness that transcends time and space in which all human life is connected – has been around for about 3,000 years. It is Vedic.
When the film’s astronaut hero (Matthew McConaughey), declares that the mysterious and all-knowing “they” who created a wormhole near Saturn through which he travels to save mankind – dissolving his sense of material reality in the process – are in fact “us” he is simply repeating the central notion of the Upanishads, India’s oldest philosophical texts. These hold that individual human minds are merely brief reflections within a cosmic one.
McConaughey’s character doesn’t just talk the talk. He walks it, too. So, the multi-dimensional tesseract – that endlessly reflective prism he finds himself in as he comes to this realisation, and in which he views life from every perspective – is the film’s expression of “Indra’s net”, the Hindu metaphor which depicts the universe as an eternal web of existence spun by the king of the gods, each of its intersections adorned with an infinitely sided jewel, every one continually reflecting the others.
Hollywood’s eager embrace of Buddhism, yoga and other esoteric Indian systems is not new, of course. David Lynch is an outspoken exponent of transcendental meditation, Richard Gere follows the Dalai Lama and Julia Roberts affirmed her Hinduism in the wake of Eat, Pray, Love – a movie that tells the tale of a modern American woman’s journey towards peace through Indian spiritual practises that grossed over $200m. Hinduism can get the tills ringing even when it urges parsimony.
Nolan has long been a devout subscriber to the cause. A director famed for being able to get a multi-million dollar project off the ground with only his own name as collateral, he clearly knows the value of pre-existing brands such as Hinduism. His breakthrough hit, Memento, had Guy Pearce as an amnesiac whose unreliable consciousness is the faulty lens through which we see the story of a murder, told both in chronological and reverse order. This notion of distrusting individual reality and looking beyond it for truth was extended in Nolan’s Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio leads a team of psychonauts on a heist deep within the recesses of a billionaire’s mind – a spiralling adventure of dreams within dreams in which the laws of nature increasingly bend and warp – before finding its purest expression in Interstellar.
“Look at the first Matrix movie,” says producer Peter Rader. “It’s a yogic movie. It says that this world is an illusion. It’s about maya – that if we can cut through the illusions and connect with something larger we can do all sorts of things. Neo achieves the abilities of the advanced yogis Yogananda described, who can defy the laws of normal reality.”
Rader’s latest movie, a documentary about Paramahansa Yogananda – among the first gurus to bring Indian mysticism to America in the 1920s – has been a sleeper hit in the US. The film documents how influential Hindu philosophy is in American culture, with contributions from the likes of the yoga-devoted hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. “There’s a big pent-up demand,” thinks Rader. “There are a lot of closet spiritualists who are meditating, doing yoga, reading books and thinking about a bigger reality. And now they can come out and say, ‘Yes, I’m into this.’Steve Jobs read Yogananda’s book once a year. He bequeathed a copy of it to everyone who attended his memorial. It helped inspire him to develop products like the iPad.”
But before Nolan, before the Matrix, before, even, the iPad, there was Star Wars: the film that opened mainstream America up to Indian esotericism more than anything else, with its cosmic scale and theme of a transcendental “force” that confers superhuman powers on those who can align with it. George Lucas was influenced by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose work A Hero With a Thousand Faces traced the narrative arc common to all mythic heroes that Luke Skywalker would embark upon. Campbell himself lived by his Upanishadic mantra “follow your bliss”, which he derived from the Sanskrit term Sat-Chit-Ananda.
“The word Sat means being,” said Campbell. “Chit means consciousness. Ananda means bliss or rapture. I thought: ‘I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not, but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being’.” His mantra was the paradigm for Skywalker’s own realisation of the force, the sense of peace, purpose and power gained once he allowed himself to accept and unify with it. “If you follow your bliss,” thought Campbell, “you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”
As his mastery of the force neared its peak, Skywalker comes perilously close to taking Vader’s sinister path. With this, Star Wars established the principle in Hollywood of superheroes having to overcome an inner darkness while battling an external enemy, and finding an enlightenment in the process. Nolan’s trilogy of Batman movies – in which a tortured protagonist struggles as much not to become his nemesis as to defeat it – have introduced a whole new generation to the Indian god-myths and the teachings of yoga that emphasise the priority of one’s internal journey while facing the challenges of the outside world. Next year, even younger recruits to the cause will feel the force of the new JJ Abrams’ Star Wars movie.
“Spirituality is the open-secret,” says Rader. “A lot of people know that if we quieten down we can tap into a deeper power. And the movies that tap into that, like Star Wars and Interstellar, are hugely popular. Audiences know what the film is telling them, they have a sense that this story is working on a deeper level. It’s telling them that there’s more to life than just the ordinary. That there’s something much bigger, and they’re a part of it.”
A philosophy to which many are keen to subscribe is what makes religions successful. Movies, too.
In February, as rumours of the ambitions of Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law swirled amidst the heat and dust of the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, her daughter Priyanka moved to scotch speculation about Robert Vadra’s possible political future.
“He’s a successful businessman,” the younger Ms. Gandhi said of her husband, “who is not interested in changing his occupation.”
Even though Mr. Vadra has increasingly emerged in the public eye, there has been little information on just how successful a businessman he is — and how his empire was built.
Last year, The Economic Times first wrote about his “low-key entry into the real estate business” with the help of DLF Ltd, India’s largest commercial property developer. And on Friday, Arvind Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan of India Against Corruption (IAC) released documents which showed how Mr. Vadra has acquired land assets in and around the National Capital Region worth hundreds of crores of rupees, sometimes at prices below market value — funded by interest-free loans disbursed to him by DLF and other companies for no apparent reason.
Though the documents reveal no illegality or impropriety on the part of Mr. Vadra, they do raise the question of why DLF — which is a publicly traded company — would enter into multiple business transactions with him on terms that appear highly preferential. The company on Saturday issued a lengthypress release setting out its side of the story but questions of corporate governance remain and minority shareholders are likely to ask the company for the rationale behind its arrangement with Ms. Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law and whether similar soft loans (or “advances” as DLF prefers to call them) and deals have been transacted with companies owned by other prominent individuals. The answer to the second question may help explain why a normally feisty Opposition has been remarkably silent on the DLF-Vadra connection since the story first broke in 2011.
In 1997, the year Mr. Vadra married Priyanka Gandhi, he incorporated his first, modest business — Artex, which dealt with brass handicrafts and fashion accessories. From 2007, there was a surge in his activities. Inside of a year, he founded five other ventures, spanning the real estate, hospitality and trading sectors.
Ms. Gandhi maintained a distance from these companies: in 2008, she dissociated herself from the sole business in which she was involved, aircraft charter firm Blue Breeze Trading.
From balance sheets and directors’ reports released by IAC and additional papers obtained by The Hindu, which relate to six group companies, it is clear that Mr. Vadra’s rise was meteoric. In 2007-2008, his companies started out with promoter funds of just Rs. 50 lakh.
However, the companies succeeded in acquiring 29 high-value properties by 2010, armed with loans and advances of Rs. 80 crore from DLF,… as well as Bedarwals Infra Projects, Nikhil International and VRS Infrastructure. These included a Rs. 31.7 crore acquisition of a 50 per cent share of Saket Courtyard by 2010, armed with loans and advances of Rs. 80 crore from DLF, as well as Bedarwals Infra Projects, Nikhil International and VRS Infrastructure.
These included a Rs. 31.7 crore acquisition of a 50 per cent share of Saket Courtyard Hospitality, which owns the 114-bed Hilton Garden Hotel in New Delhi; a 10,000 square foot penthouse, number B1115, at the DLF Aralias complex for Rs 89.41 lakh; 7 apartments in DLF Magnolia for Rs. 5.2 crore; apartments for Rs. 5.06 crore at DLF Capital Greens; and a DLF-owned plot in Delhi’s ultra-posh Greater Kailash II area for Rs. 1.21 crore. Though DLF’s press release said some of these prices were “completely incorrect,” the investment numbers are all stated in the balance sheets filed by Mr. Vadra’s companies with the Registrar of Companies.
Then, at the end of 2010, Mr. Vadra’s companies also picked up a bouquet of rural properties: 160.62 acres of agricultural land in Bikaner for Rs. 1.02 crore, and Rs. 2.43 crore for an additional 5 parcels of land of unknown acreage; land at Manesar, on Delhi’s fringes, for Rs. 15.38 crore; land at Palwal for Rs. 42 lakh, land at Hayyatpur, in Gurgaon, for roughly Rs. 4 crore; land at Hasanpur for Rs. 76.07 lakh; land at Mewat for Rs. 95.42 lakh; unidentified agricultural land for Rs. 69.09 lakh; and two ‘other real estate bookings’ worth Rs. 9 lakh.
From just Rs. 7.95 crore in fiscal 2008, Vadra’s fixed assets and investments grew to Rs 17.18 crore in fiscal 2009, jumping a staggering 350 per cent in a single year to Rs 60.53 crore in fiscal 2010, the year in which most of these properties were acquired with promoter funds of just Rs. 50 lakh along with interest of Rs. 255.46 lakh earned on advances and loans and zero group activity or profitability.
Despite the high market value of these listed assets (properties), though, the declared investment portfolio in Mr. Vadra’s balance sheets remained a meagre Rs. 71 crore at the end of fiscal 2010 with accumulated group losses of Rs. 3 crore.
Mr. Vadra’s companies did not respond to e-mails sent by The Hindu seeking clarifications on the details of these transactions. In particular, it remains unclear why DLF and other major corporations would have made him large loans, since this is not in the nature of their business. Nor did Mr. Vadra’s companies have any apparent prior specialisation in real estate business.
Financial wizardry
The financial information available from the balance sheets and directors’ reports of Mr. Vadra’s companies — Sky Light Hospitality, Sky Light Realty, Blue Breeze Trading, Artex, Real Earth Estates and North India IT Parks — raise hard questions about what business it is they actually do, and how this business is conducted.
Each of the companies has 268, Sukhdev Vihar, New Delhi, as its common address, and Mr. Vadra and his mother Maureen Vadra as directors. Mr. Vadra, the documents show, receives remuneration of Rs. 60 lakh per annum from just one company, Sky Light Realty. The payment, the company’s auditor states is “remuneration in excess of the limit prescribed under section 217 (2A) of the Companies Act, 1956 read with the Companies (Particulars of Employees) Rules 1975.”
There are no other employee costs in the books, either to his mother or to others. However, in the documents, both directors “place on record their deep sense of appreciation for the committed services of executives, staff and workers of the company.”
Strangely, while assets balloon in each subsequent balance sheet, there is no account of the corresponding enhancement of visible business activity. For example, the balance sheets raise a current liability of Rs. 50 crore against the Manesar land, though it was registered for just Rs.15.38 crore in the same financial year, defying all commercial and financial prudence and raising doubts about whether this was an income rather than a current liability.
A senior chartered accountant told The Hindu on condition of anonymity, given the individuals involved, that masking incomes as loans/current liabilities in this manner is an unorthodox accounting device. “Using short term funding of this kind to create long-term assets defies financial prudence as it constitutes a high business risk, unless they are not really ‘current liabilities’ and are not payable in the short term, which means they are nothing but incomes which have been disguised,” he said. Vadra’s auditors consistently overlook this in all six firms, while accounting firm Khurana & Khurana in its Auditors Report for Real Earth Estates Pvt. Ltd. for the year 2010, actually opts to gloss over this by stating: “Based on the information and explanation given to and on an overall examination of the balance sheet of the company, in our opinion, there are no funds raised on short term basis which have been used for long term investment.”
The auditor’s accounting rigor comes into further question with its statement that according to the information and explanations given to us, the company has, during the year, not granted any loans, secured or unsecured to companies, firm or other parties covered in the register maintained under section 31 of the Companies Act 1956, excepting the advances under business obligation accordingly paragraphs 4 (iii) (a) (b) (c) and (d) of the order are not applicable. However, the balance sheet shows loans and advances of Rs 2.89 crore for the company in 2010.
Many such loans, which reflect as total current liability of Rs. 72 crore in the accounts, are invested in long-term assets like land. Curiously, no one appears to be pressing for the return of these loans — which are, according to the documents, interest-free.
Additionally, all of Mr. Vadra’s companies show interest income from fixed deposits, claiming tax deducted at source for this interest without accounting for the fixed deposits themselves in the balance sheets. The six companies’ profitability, which grew from zero in 2007-8 to Rs. 20.94 lakh in 2008-9 to Rs. 255.46 lakh in 2009-10, was not from any business activity in these companies but purely from interest on 23 elusive fixed deposits amounting to roughly Rs. 5 crore.
There are other unexplained gaps in the financial information. As of March 31, 2010, the group profit and loss account shows that only Sky Light Realty made a profit, and that too in one single year. Yet, while the others show losses, they continue to make investments. This profit of Rs. 244.98 lakh was despite a complete absence of business activity or liquidation/reduction of fixed assets, investments or other bookings. However, the accumulated losses of Rs. 3 crore from the other 5 firms in the RV Group’s 2010 balance sheet wipe out Vadra’s capital and reserves, raising questions about his ability to buy so many high value properties with zero capital.
DLF’s fortunes
Perhaps the key to the relationship could lie in DLF’s troubled fortunes since 2008 — the very time its dealings with Mr. Vadra acquired significant scale. According to a March 1, 2012 report by the respected Veritas Investment Research Corporation, DLF Ltd is an organisation under duress, with its management scrambling to consummate assets sales, rationalize its land bank and divest non-core operations.
Since a May, 2007 Initial Public Offering, which sold at Rs. 525 per share, the stock price declined by 46 per cent in March 2012 compared to a roughly 30 per cent gain in the Sensex over the same period with the stock presently trading at Rs. 241.80, a steep 54.13 per cent dip.
Veritas points to questionable related-party transactions, aggressive and conflicting accounting policies, self-enrichment and inability to deliver on promises, and a balance sheet stretched to the limit, with no free cash flow and no credible plan to de-lever its balance sheet. “If your investment decision incorporates management integrity, then bypassing DLF will be an easy choice,” the Veritas report states.
In addition, Veritas does “not believe the disclosed book equity and asset base of the company,” stating that via its dealings (merger) with DLF Assets Ltd (DAL), from FY 2007 to FY 2011, the company inflated sales by at least Rs. 11,236 crore and its profit before tax by Rs. 7,233 crore.
A slowing real estate market in a high inflation environment and over-exposure to Gurgaon — among India’s most speculative real estate markets — is further expected to create tremendous pressure on the company’s balance sheet. “In the end, we believe DLF will seek assistance from financial institutions to restructure its loans,” the report affirms, urging investors not to buy DLF stock. DLF dismissed the report as “mischievous and presumptive.”
Mr. Vadra himself has attributed his brass-to-gold success story to hard work—and a little help from “family” friends like K.P. Singh, the chairman of the DLF Group. However, Mr. Vadra has strongly denied taking any favours from DLF in the past. “I have a good understanding with DLF. Our children are friends, we are friends. They are seasoned businessmen. They are not daft… They don't need me to enhance them. They’ve existed for years,” he told The Economic Times in March 2011.
Indeed, in January 2002, he made his distaste for favour-seeking capitalism public, dissociating himself from his brother and father, alleging that they were promising jobs and favours using his name and association with the Gandhi family. His father responded by suing him for defamation.
Hard work Mr. Vadra may well have put into building his property empire. But the help he received from friends like DLF suggests at least a part of his success flowed from the willingness of others to bet on the outcome of his enterprise.
