Free Gods and Godmen of India by Khushwant Singh Page A

Search of a Home for their Knowledge
    A  man unfairly maligned by Indian bigots and misinformed foreigners was Acharya Rajneesh (Osho). Despite being a teacher of comparative religions, he had a penchant for needling the narrow-minded, amongst them the patron saint of puritans, Morarji Desai. Osho exposed the humbug in Indian life and the double standards observed by its self-styled godmen and political leaders.
    He was hounded out of India. He then sought asylum in the United States where he met the same fate. Egged on by church dignitaries, the US administration ordered his arrest and deportation.
    There was a time when no country was willing to accept him. Ultimately, he returned to India and restarted his commune in Pune where he spent the last days of his life.
    It took a long time for people to realize that Osho had much more to him than being a crusader against man-made conventional morality. He brought his vast knowledge of the world’s scriptures and lives of saintly men and women to convey his message. What made him different from other world teachers was that while they made religious subjects boring, Osho made them enjoyable.
    The present generation has come to acknowledge Osho as one of the greatest minds produced by India. So it is befitting that the 50th year of our independence should have been celebrated with the publication of an anthology of articles on tributes Osho paid to the spiritual legacy of his country. India My Love: Fragments of a Golden Past was released by Dr Manmohan Singh, as saintly a politician as any Indian has seen since independence.
    The common notion is that Osho preached free sex, which he did and did not. An excellent example of how he put across his point of view on the subject is available in this. First he relates a story of Mulla Nasiruddin: “When Nasiruddin was 100 years old and celebrated his centenary, press reporters asked him, If you had your life to live again, would you commit the same mistakes again?”
    “Nasiruddin said, ‘I would definitely make those mistakes, but I would also make all the others that I was not able to make. That is the only change I would make. In this life, I began making mistakes very late in life. If I were to live my life all over again, I would get an earlier start.’
    “Then the reporters asked him, ‘What is the secret of your long life?’ Nasiruddin said, ‘I did not drink until I was 10, I did not smoke and did not touch a girl until then. Except for this, I don’t see any other secret for my long life. But if I had another life, I would begin to make even those mistakes a little earlier.’”
    Having said this, Osho extols the virtues of brahmacharya till the age of 25. “Today, in both the East and the West, there are very few people who are really sexually contended, although sex is more open and readily available than it has ever been in the past. Still, very few people are sexually fulfilled.
    “The reason: even before the energy and strength for sex is allowed to accumulate, it is already dissipated. Before the fruit ripens, the roots begin to lose their nourishing juices. The fruit is not allowed to really ripen. Fruits that are unripe cannot fall from the tree, but ripe fruits drop naturally; even the tree does not know when they have fallen. For the fruit to ripen, nourishment is necessary, and for life experiences to mature much energy is needed.
    “This is why, for the first 25 years of life, everything is designed for creating and accumulating energy.”
    Come to think of it, Osho was not saying anything new on the subject; only re-emphasizing what he accepted by Indian tradition.
    23/3/1997

Joy and Laughter as Religion
    A mong all the world’s founders of religious cults it was only Sri Krishna who set an example proving that a person could propound an immortal code of the ethics (the Bhagwad Gita), and at the same time like a mortal enjoy the good things of life: dancing, singing and flirting with pretty girls.