The labels “commune” and “ashram” have been unceremoniously dropped, Ma and Swami shrugged off as prefixes. Life-size photographs of the man with the flowing beard and piercing eyes, Rajneesh Chandra Mohan Jain aka Acharya Rajneesh aka Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh aka Osho, have disappeared from the walls and corners. The swirl of maroon robes remains—you still have to wear one to enter—as does the initiatory ritual of an HIV test. But the Pune ashram of the man who preached a path from sex to superconsciousness is a sanitised space—the Osho International Meditation Resort.

The easy thing, of course, would be to succumb to the notion, as well as the opinion of many an old-timer, that in its compulsion to keep up with the times, the centre has somewhat misplaced its soul. The trappings of modern-day luxury that dot the 40-acre complex, from the huge swimming pool to the Jacuzzis, from the tennis courts to the restaurants, will bear you out. The drug orgies that shocked Pune in the ’90s don’t make headlines anymore and there is more than a whiff of conformism in the description of the place as “the only place in the world that combines meditation with resort facilities”.

Except that, as Amrit Sadhana, who has been associated with the commune since the ’70s and is now part of the management team for India, suggests—this is perhaps a change to subtlety. You could call it growing up. From the days of wild abandon in the ’70s to the rebellion of the ’80s to the ’90s, when the commune tried too hard to be accepted by inviting Zakir Hussain and Hariprasad Chaurasia on Osho’s death and birth anniversaries, the Osho centre seems to have matured.

... contd.