4th week's sunday

two days ago, i met with rajnikant around 1:30 p.m. to take a tour of the world famous "osho international" ashram. commune, that is. no, that's not it either, they like to be referred to as "meditation resort" these days. be it!

unfortunately, you are not allowed to take pictures inside the resort. then again, we were only given ten minutes actually inside of the osho. before that, a 30-minutes film was to enlighten us about how bad the lives we are leading really are without osho in them. if you want to see for yourself, check out www.osho.com.

in my opinion, the resort constitutes a very well-conceived vacation park. in contrast to the world surrounding the osho, everything looks neat and fresh inside. beautiful park areas, a pool, a state-of-the-art kitchen, small cafés, and much more let this resort appear as a luxury "center park". two very clever aspects make the osho so successfull. first, in a country like india, a clean and silent area is something many people crave. second, people coming here do not have to say "i am going to hang out at this luxurious resort in poor india". pimping the whole thing by blending it with a spiritual "i am off to discovering myself" sounds a lot better, doesn't it?

the business model also makes perfect sense. nobody is denied access to the osho since prospects do not have to meet specific requirements such as practicing a certain religion. furthermore, signing up for the resort, you do not limit yourself to only one form of therapy either. yoga, arun, zen, ayurveda...you name it! all you have to do is replace your regular clothes with a maroon robe and pay (as an international) 1400 for the first and 550 rupees for every additional day. not exactly too expensive (compulsory hiv test included!). with the words of a business student: shotgun marketing combined with fixed cost degression. when osho himself was still around, he reportedly owned, among other things, more than 90 rolls royces. you do the math!

afterwards, rajnikant introduced me to some rather dodgy parts of the regular indian sunday. according to him, the hindu's calendar "tolerates" the consumption of alcohol only on sundays. the first place we went to was a restaurant possessing also an alcohol license. they did not have many lights burning there. then we went to a liquor store, where you can buy virtually everything from beer to booze. since you are not allowed to drin in public, a very, VERY filthy back room provided relief in this regard (see picture with the little boy putting away empty bottles). at last, we bought "masala paan", which is a betel leaf filled with mainly areca nut. i am still trying to figure out what exactly i had there. rajnikant got himself something blended with tobacco. "nicht fur dich, aber hab vertrauen", were his words...

on the way home, we made a detour and drove to pune aiport. on the way there, i got a good impression about what "suburban india" means.

for next sunday, we put the mahatma gandhi memorial to the top of the sightseeing list. or some town built into the mountains although that might be too hot for the wimpy european. pune scored a temperature record for the month of march this last weekend (40°c), which closes the gap to the last post...

so long,
ti-bob