Sometimes, while browsing in Calcutta’s glittering bookshops with dangerously slippery floors, I make the mistake of sliding to a stop at the Philosophy shelf. Nothing can be more dismal, and more indicative of the appetite for pseudo-mystical pontification (the Bengali word for it is gyan) among the Indian mall-haunting classes. Among the wan Bertrand Russells and the stray Thus Spake Zarathustra, it is the likes of Robin Sharma, Osho, Krishnamurti, Coelho, De Bono and a few other mixed-up, East-West names holding the keys to wellness that invariably get the pride of place — not to forget the white witches, feng-shui masters and tarot-readers. (Classical Indian philosophy, of the obviously Hindu variety, is sent off to Religion.) Very quickly, Philosophy shades into Psychology (untellapartable from Astrology), followed by Self-Help turning into Management. Then exit swiftly, past new iPods or designer hand- lotions, into coffee-shop.

It occurred to me, while thinking about this Indian taste for gyan-dispensing phoneyness, that the father of them all was, and remains, Kahlil Gibran. Who has not been through the first throes of infatuation or passionate friendship (when everything, and nothing, is perfectly platonic), without giving to the Other a copy of The Prophet? Remember that ivory cover with the messianic portrait, and those fake-Blake illustrations of naked men and women with vague genitals floating about in space, looking obscurely self-absorbed? Remember “the pain of too much tenderness”, or “let there be spaces in your togetherness”?

Well, most people indulge their Gibran phase to the hilt — it can be a lot of fun, and so safe in its touching innocence — and then outgrow it, usually towards the end of Class IX. (For me, the great antidote was Agatha Christie, especially Miss Marple’s twinkling unsentimentality.) But there is a disconcertingly high number of adults who seem to have got stuck at Gibran — and I have often wondered why. (Naseeruddin Shah came to Calcutta a year or so ago and did an entirely earnest solo performance of The Prophet in a hall full of ecstatic adults.)

Why is it that big-city Indians, who otherwise enjoy Tarantino and Om Shanti Om and crack the most dreadful Holocaust jokes without batting an eyelid, suddenly become lugubrious and dopey when the departing Almustafa starts holding forth on Love, Marriage, Children, Eating, Drinking, Work, Clothes, Time, Prayer and just about everything above and below the moon, unstoppably and on very little provocation? I have been to engagements, marriages, memorial services and wedding anniversaries where people have solemnly read out bits from Gibran. Most of them would describe themselves as “spiritual, but not religious”, and sway to Spirituals and Qawwali with equal enthusiasm. But somewhere, the allure of the holier-than-thou remains irresistible.

I was hugely chuffed to learn recently, from a bitchy piece in The New Yorker, that the Gibran craze began in America, where Gibran and family had emigrated from Lebanon in 1895. Apparently, he is the third bestselling poet in the world (after Shakespeare and Lao-tzu), and claimed — in all seriousness — that he had intuited the theory of relativity before Einstein, but hadn’t bothered to write it down.