Deepak Chopra’s son makes documentary on dad, Decoding Deepak

“His audience often has a very idealized version of him and that is a hard expectation to meet,” ABC News quoted Gotham as saying on ‘Nightline’. “There is a classic tradition in this country of elevating our celebrities, for the lack of a better word, to a certain place and then trying to topple them and taking great glee in that,” he said.

‘Decoding Deepak’ paints an intimate and not always flattering portrait of his Chopra. In the movie, Gotham captures his father scratching his back side, snoring when he was supposed to be meditating and constantly on his BlackBerry. He portrays him as being obsessed with the public eye and detached from his family. “I am detached. I am independent. My love for my son is none of his business and I would love him to irrespective of that,” Deepak said. Deepak said he was not offended by the way he is depicted in his son’s film. Gotham said the point was to show that he is a human being. “It’s the first half of the movie that is quite cynical,” Gotham said. “It’s part of growing up in this bubble. You cannot grow up in the world of self-help and new age and all of that without seeing the irony of it all,” he said.

However, Gotham said that there was a turning point in making the film. “What I have come out with is a deep appreciation and respect not only for him, but for it, meaning his audience. And what people are searching for, what they are finding and how he is helping them,” Gotham said. In the film, Gotham portrays himself as the prodigal son who was groomed to inherit the keys to his father’s spiritual empire, but instead went off to be first a journalist, and then an entrepreneur and filmmaker.

He is seen as a man who still nurses wounds from a childhood with an often absent father. “My father was not the father who came to soccer games or played catch in the front yard,” he said. Deepak claims he wasn’t hurt that his son portrayed him that way because he said it was the truth.