Just push rewind

Remember the Rishi Kapoor-starrer Karz? The film that was remade last year with Himesh Reshamiya playing Chintoo Baba’s role, dealt with rebirth. In the movie, the girl the hero loves conspires against him to get him killed.Naturally, he is reborn to take revenge on his lover and her accomplice. The movie and its songs were a superhit.

So were Madhumati, Milan, Kudrat and Om Shanti Om. The list of movies that banked on the theme of reincarnation and rebirth to set the cash registers tingling at the box office is endless.

Interestingly, Indian television has made few, if not zero, attempts at repeating the success story using the same theme, on the small screen. One cannot recollect a serial that has been based on the concept of rebirth. Yes, there has been a show or two on split personalities, but none on reincarnation or rebirth specifically.

A new show — Raaz Picchle Janam Ka — claims to fill that vacant slot and be the first television show on rebirth. And wait, it is not a serial, it is a reality show where the participant will be made to remember, describe his past life and thereby solve some of the problems in his current life. All of this will be done live on television using something called ‘past life regression technique’.

The past life regression technique, according to a media release from NDTV Imagine  —the broadcasters — is a therapy that uses a conscious meditative technique to recover memories from our past life. Apparently, it even helps address fears, phobias and physical ailments in our present day lives by finding their roots in our previous lives.

These counseling sessions will be conducted by psychologist and therapist Dr Trupti Jayin and the show will be hosted by Bhojpuri superstar Ravi Kishaan. The school that subscribes to the past life regression theory believes that a lot of our problems can be traced back to some incident or experience in our past life.

For example, if you have an unexplainable fear of heights or experience frighteningly real moments of deja vu or have a recurring dream that has haunted you since childhood, the school of thought feels that it  may be related to your past life. You may have encountered something in your last life which led you to be scared of that eventuality in your current life.

Raaz — Picchle Janam Ka attempts to dive deeper into your persona through this technique and find out the origins of these fears. The response, according to the broadcasters, has been phenomenal. NDTV Imagine had invited applications to participate in this show and within 25 days they received over 8000 calls from people who wanted to participate in this show and explore their past life. One can understand a person’s quest to know his or her future, but past? Guess, anything to do with supernatural sells!

The makers of the show, understandably disagree, and  feel that Raaz... will bring about a positive change in the lives of the people retrieving memories from their past lives. Trupti Jayin, a certified clinical psychologist who has been practicing this method for the last 10 years explains, “This show has had a very good response so far. People from Nandu, Patna, Chattisgarh, Karnataka and all over the country are coming and most of them have benefited from this session.”

But does it really work? “If someone doubts this method, they should not come for this show. There is a difference between reincarnation and past life regression. In the former process, a researcher goes to a subject while in the later the subject comes to the researcher. On the show, we will talk to the subjects and make them revisit their past lives,” she explains.

Apparently, some people who participated in the show have already benefited from the technique, including a 26-year old guy who had a fear of crowds and a 25-year-old girl who had a fear of playing Holi. Both of them were able to trace the problem back to their previous lives and solve it in their current life to a great extent.

The guests on the show will be a mix of common people and celebrities. Interestingly, well known faces from the television and film industry including Shekhar Suman, Monica Bedi, Celine Jetley and Neelima Azim have participated in this show. Reports say that Shekhar Suman apparently broke down on the sets while remembering his elder son who passed away many years ago. Rumours doing the rounds also say that superstars like Rekha had been approached for this show, but she declined.

The show, produced in association with Ideas Box Productions, premieres on Monday, December 7 at 9:30 pm and will be telecast every Monday to Friday on NDTV Imagine.