Time & Perspective Quote by Deepak Chopra

Chopra’s line is less a geography lesson than a rebuke: the West isn’t “discovering” India out of curiosity, he implies, but out of creative exhaustion. The phrasing deliberately echoes colonial language - “discovered India” - to expose how old habits return in new costumes. What used to be empire’s hunger for spice and labor becomes culture’s hunger for meaning, novelty, and spiritual cachet. It’s a sharp inversion: the gaze that once treated India as a material resource now treats it as an imaginative one.

The key move is his notion of “raw material for imagination.” He frames imagination like industry, an engine that needs inputs, and suggests the dominant culture has depleted its own supplies. That’s a flattering offer and a warning at once. India becomes a quarry of symbols - yoga, Ayurveda, mysticism, “ancient wisdom” - ready to be mined by a world that wants transformation without the inconvenience of history, politics, or social complexity.

Calling India’s imaginative raw material “inexhaustible” is purposeful mythmaking. It sells India as abundance, a perpetual source that can’t be used up. The subtext is cultural power: if the West is spiritually cash-poor, India holds a different currency. But the line also risks repeating the very essentialism it critiques, compressing a vast, modern country into a romantic reservoir of timeless insight.

Context matters: Chopra rose with the late-20th-century boom in New Age spirituality and wellness globalization. The quote defends that fascination while trying to discipline it, insisting the “India” being consumed should be treated as more than an exotic mood board.