But Anandmurti is not the only Indian who considers herself the Chosen One. There's also filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, who already runs the wildly successful Sufi music festival, Jahan-e-Khusrau (the only traditional music festival where touts lurk near the spectacular venue outside Humayun's tomb selling tickets "in black"). His proposed feature film on Rumi, Ali says, will be an opportunity to expose the real Rumi to India, "the true inheritor of Rumi's secular mantle".
But while Ali's film has yet to get off the ground, others are jumping on to the Rumi bandwagon. When Amrit Kent, an Urdu poet and Sufi singer, discovered Rumi three years ago, she decided to write a play on his life, Rumi—Unveil the Sun. Against all expectations, the play has found resonance among the young. Two groups, one in Delhi and the other in Hyderabad, are planning to stage it in the next two weeks, with performances planned in Pakistan and the UK. Says one of the play's two directors, Zainee Zaheer, a 28-year-old wedding planner whose passion has been Rumi ever since she read him in English translation a few years ago: "Rumi is not just a poet, he is more than that." For the neo-Rumi enthusiasts, it's his religion of love they are celebrating this year.
