Hollywood actor Mike Myers’ “The Love Guru,” panned by movie critics even before it hit theatres in America, is also getting a thumbs down from a Hindu group. The Hindu American Foundation (HAF) declared the movie to be vulgar and crude, but not anti-Hindu.
The Paramount Pictures production stars Myers as a Deepak Chopra wannabe named Guru Pitka who is hired by the owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs, played by Jessica Alba, to reunite her top player and his estranged wife.
The Paramount Pictures invited members of the HAF to a pre-screening of the film in Minneapolis on Thursday night, just hours before its release. “The film was vulgar, crude and, in the opinion of many of our attendees, too often tasteless in its puerile choice of humour,” said Aseem Shukla, member of the HAF's Board of Directors. “Very few of the Hindus viewing the film, however, found it overtly anti-Hindu or mean-spirited, indeed no Hindu or Sanskrit terms beyond guru or ashram are ever used in the film. Given the costumes and overall concept of the film, Paramount would have done well to issue a disclaimer in the opening sequence that the characters and events are not based on Hindu spiritual masters," he said.
Sivakumaran Raman, a health care consultant based in Minneapolis, bemoaned the loss of an opportunity to move away from such ridiculous caricatures of the Hindus and the Indians.
