Brahma Kumaris

We were a merry crew setting off for the airport to fly to Sao Paolo this morning. There was no doubt that Rio had been more than victorious and we even managed to slip I one extra interview with our driver on the way to the airport. He used to be a drug cop here in Brasil but was dismissed after he shot four people and one of them was just a bystander. He told us how he’d become totally immune to death. He kept a loaded gun with him at all times and said it wasn’t until he had grandchildren that his heart opened again and he felt love. Jessica had had amazing chats with a driver in Australia this week and had told me that we have to interview all our drivers on this trip. It’s true that they do seem to have the most amazing stories. Driving and being a roady seems to be the modern version of the Foreign Legion. You know what they say; ‘roady to forget’.

At the airport we were taking bets again for how hard they were going to sting us for our bags. Including Junno, Shanti and Anna there were countless bags going through and I thought the guy wasn’t adding it up. I was wrong. Once again we were 50 or 60kg over and we braced ourselves for the bad news. Shanti was smiling sweetly at him in a transparent attempt to win him over. He hit us for 50R which about £10. Caramaba!

I can’t wait for everyone to see the next session we did. After an endless drive through Sao Paolo Airport to the theatre where we were meeting the ‘body percussion group’, and I mean endless, miles and miles of identical, downtown-L.A. looking metropolis, unrelentingly grey and muggy, we finally unloaded in the small modern building and the twelve artists showed us their stuff. The squeaked, thumped, croaked and were just fantastic, and of course, as usual, guess who had to leave early to get to an interview?

Anna had set up an appointment with one of Sao Paolo’s most successful advertising agency heads, a woman called Cristina who was very famous for her radical, progressive views about the media and also a great Mum. Unfortunately, without Bernardo or Joshua, Ben had tried to run Anna through the sound monitoring on the Hi Def camera for the session and the information had clearly not gone in. They showed us to a very corporate meeting room to set up and suddenly it was Anna and Shanti, the keystone cops, trying to fiddle with every switch and button to get the sound to come through the clip mike. I was tired and frustrated and had to consciously make myself get it together to be cool for when the lady arrived to be interviewed. I decided to just wait in another area of the place until they told me it was sorted and made a mental note to get Ben to teach me the sound set up on these new cameras so I don’t need to rely on anyone ever again in these situations.

They got it together pretty soon.

Then this really cool looking woman walked in and kissed us all warmly. When Anna first told me about this interview I was hoping for a really arrogant Ad Exec who could be a villain for the film, boasting about how easy it was to manipulate people into buying a whole load of shit they don’t need. But no matter how many times I’ve been asking our guys to find us dodgy people in every location, but maybe it’s just the 1 Giant Leap karma, I’m looking for villains, and all I’m getting is angels.

Everything she expressed was so heartfelt. Whether she was talking about her kids, the perversion of the media, her unhappy childhood, she was so sincere I was really moved. Then she started talking about when she used to get panic attacks after having done an Aiawasca , something that I myself have had extreme suffering through over the last 15 years, since I had a monstrously bad acid trip. She said that she’d had the experience that she didn’t dare sleep a night in a bed that wasn’t her own, couldn’t travel without her husband being with her, and once again, it was an exact mirror of my own experience in my twenties. For me it had become a very real problem to go off touring with the various bands I’d played with, as I would melt down when I’d awake in the middle of the night, racing and wired, and find myself somewhere alien. She said that she received a random email from an organisation called the Brahma Kumaris, an Indian group of nuns who had centres all over the world, and they’d invited her to come and be part of a conference there. Somehow, even though she had been routinely turning down requests to even talk in Rio, 40 minutes away, she felt she wanted to accept this invitation and she was rewarded by finding God there, who loved her, and who she finally realised she deserved to be in the company of. The hair on my arms was standing on end. Not only because she was so vulnerable and beautiful as she spoke, but though the Brahma Kumaris are quite an obscure group, not particularly well known, I myself have a particular connection to them through my Mother-in-law, Lynne. Jess’s Mum has been an periphery member of the sect for years and I’ve even talked at a couple of their conferences. When I asked if Dadi Jankti was there, the ‘Mother Superior’ of the organisation, her eyes nearly popped out of her head. When I asked if she’d met a woman called Lynne there who used to be in PR, she nearly fell off her chair, and raced to her office to bring me Lynne’s book, ‘SEED’ about the ethical way to do business. Apparently it had been a conversation with Lynne in India that had spurred her on to cut her ties with the old-school of media and advertising and now only take clients who were promoting healthy values.

There had been so much synchronicity with her that I was flying and she took me to her other conference room to meet her staff and show me a really moving video about parents of slain soldiers and kids in Israel and Palestine who had got together to begin a renewed peace movement. Her P.A. brought out chocolates and soft drinks, and it was only when I got a phone call to tell me Joshua was stranded at the Airport two hours away that we had to reluctantly take our leave. That and the splitting headache I had from having forgotten to eat today (oops).