In ancient times, the guru worked mainly for shishyas, or students, imparting knowledge, serving the people around him.
#Wild wild country osho series#
Reading reviews of the Netflix series though, I feel I am witnessing a repeat of Osho’s vanishing act, of the man behind the Oz curtain. Perhaps there’s a cautiousness among sensitive folk in questioning a brown man these days. That point clarifies just why the focus on Sheela perturbs me so much: Bhagwan’s legacy informs a larger story, on what we allow a certain sort of man to get away with, in America, India, wherever. Even Indians can fall for the mysticism of an Indian man who looks the part. Reading later of Narayan and his colleague, I felt stunned by his insight. I couldn’t help presume Sheela more innocent than Bhagwan from the moment I met her. This can feel duplicitous, and may account for her reception, online and off, as a “ Machiavellian supervillain,” as one recent article puts it. The lying, the threats, the murder attempts - none are attributed to her needs or wants or pain. To this day, Sheela retains her protective feelings for Bhagwan she never acknowledges emotions of her own, beyond those experienced for him.
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But it’s her character that is assassinated, sent away by the courts to serve jail time and, afterward, fleeing America to live out her days in Europe. kids want to poison Bhagwan for his money and power she retaliates - though she never fully cops to details - with an alleged murder plot.
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When Ma Prem Hasya, a rich woman from L.A., becomes Bhagwan’s new No. She is a woman unlike the ones we normally see: feminine in her Princess Diana pantsuits and chic cropped hair, yet aggressive in the way of the American man, a Trump type, really. Sheela is the unofficial star of this drama. That is, until it turns nightmarish, with poison, AK-47s, and at the helm, Sheela, flashing smiles and middle fingers on national TV. The experiment succeeds, for a time, its citizenry swelling large enough to make headlines. Directed by Chapman and Maclain Way and produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, the series unfolds in Antelope, Oregon, a rural town where a man and woman - Rajneesh and his right-hand gal, Ma Anand Sheela - land in 1983 to make a utopian “city” they call Rajneeshpuram. In the new Netflix documentary series Wild Wild Country, we observe a man who upholds this rule, though he surely wouldn’t frame his holiness as feigned: the guru known in India as Osho, and in America as Bhagwan Rajneesh. “While I could appreciate an average American’s notion that every Indian was a mystic, I was rather shocked in this instance, since I expected an Indian himself to know better.” “Evidently this scientist had caught the general trend in the atmosphere,” he writes.
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“I thought at this hour you’d be in a state of mind to know the future.” Narayan reads the call as a new measure of just how far an Indian man can go in pretending to be superhuman. Why, Narayan asked, such a question, at such a time? “Don’t you get up at four for your meditations?” came the reply. phone call from a young Indian colleague, demanding a prediction of the fallout after a shake-up at the university. So strong was the “belief in my spiritual adeptness,” he writes, that he began to relate to his most celebrated work, the novel known as Guide, once subtitled “Story of a Reluctant Guru.” In the essay, whose title echoes that phrase, Narayan identifies with “Raju, the hero of my Guide who was mistaken for a saint and began to wonder at some point himself if a sudden effulgence had begun to show on his face.” He ends with the tale of a 4 a.m. He blames themes in his work for the confusion - the occult, afterlife, holiness - but also his Indianness. The story, recounted in an essay from his book Reluctant Guru, unfolds during the author’s stint in the 1960s as a visiting professor in the Midwest, where he is treated on arrival as a sort of saint. One of the funniest stories by the late Indian writer R.K. Ma Anand Sheela and Osho in the Netflix documentary series, Wild Wild Country.