Re: Osho Ashram in Pune - some Tripadvisor reviews

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Taking on the biographies of therapists outlined above, this group of
sannyasins also engendered their own informal networks of personal and
professional interest. In the past, they had followed Osho and assumed
Pune as their main residence. Yet, after his death, they became more mobile
and dispersed globally (Goldman 1999).

Though usually based in one
country (their native or a partner’s), they often deliver therapy workshops
within a cluster of nations, and more prestigious professionals even engage
in annual global tours. In their case, international work is a necessity since
local markets, even in mega cities, are seldom large enough. In this connection,
better transportation and communication technologies has enormously
facilitated their displacement, while practices of self-development
have entered the mainstream under variegated labels, formats and purposes,
enabling these therapists to make a living. In tandem, Osho centers
have multiplied around the world, becoming nodes of support and diffusion
of Osho’s work at a grassroots level.

Standing about 500 km apart, Pune and Goa are interlinked by ongoing
flows of sannyasins, trance freaks, backpackers and tourists, traveling on
buses, vans, trains, airplanes and superbikes. A large segment of these
travelers are young Israelis, estimated at about 20,000 per year (Jerusalem
Post 2004). In Goa, well-off sannyasins stay in the gentrified area of
Calangute beach, whereas younger backpackers and New Agers head
toward the more prosaic beaches of Arambol and Palolem. In the meanwhile,
trance freaks and rebellious sannyasins gather in northern Goa,
around Anjuna beach. As Chapter 5 will examine, Goa is a tourist coastal
state that also hosts, at its margins, the main nodal formation of technotrance
music in the world.

At a transnational level, Ibiza and Pune are interconnected in a unique
manner.

Considering the remoteness and smallness of Ibiza and Pune, it is striking
that both places have been sharing the same subjects coalescing into a
single globalized countercultural diaspora. It is also important to note
such transnational flows in their historical and cultural contexts. Expressive
expatriates have been fleeing to Ibiza in various waves since the 1930s.
There they experience the island as a utopian paradise and node of an
international circuit of Romantic traveling. While in India, many of these
Ibiza-based expatriates have become sannyasins, following Osho to Oregon
and then back to Pune. As sociologist Danielle Rozenberg states, Ibiza is
an ‘island of sannyasins’ (Rozenberg 1990: 82).

During the 1980s, while participating in Ibiza’s nightlife, they have
imported various New Age techniques from the US, including the use of
MDMA for therapeutic, meditational and recreational uses. In their interactions
with British and German clubbers on the island, sannyasins have
inadvertently contributed to the emergence of the rave movement, a culture
centered on electronic dance music and digital art. Techno then rapidly
flowed into the mainstream explosion of rave parties and corporate nightclubs
in Western Europe, thus delineating one countercultural genealogy
that runs from Pune, to Oregon, to Ibiza, to London, and to cosmopolitan
segments of the global youth.

Global Nomads 169 - 171

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