Money for Nothing

By Mukul Sharma

James "The Amazing" Randi is a retired American stage magician and scientific sceptic best known for his challenges to claims of the paranormal and pseudoscience. Founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, he devotes most of his post-retirement time debunking paranormal, occult and supernatural claims.

However, he's best known for his famous "million-dollar challenge" where his foundation offers "a prize of $1,000,000 to eligible applicants who can demonstrate evidence of any paranormal, supernatural or occult power or event under test conditions".

Considering the number of people who claim to possess some form of a sixth sense or other such esoteric ability like prophesy, remote healing or telepathy, it's funny that nobody has claimed the prize even though it's been around for 50 years now.

In this connection, Deepak Chopra has an interesting take. On a Fox News talk show recently, he said he was aware of the million-dollar dare but added, "It occurs to me that before we challenge people to verify the paranormal, how about just explaining the mechanisms of 'normal'? For instance, we still don't know how we experience thought.

Nor do we know the mechanics behind insight, creativity and imagination." According to him, scientific people are hell-bent trying to debunk out-of-body experiences when they can't explain in-body experiences! The New Age guru might have a point there.

Imagine telling a Zen master, "Okay, I'll give you a million dollars if you can prove under strict lab conditions that you're enlightened. If not, you fail."