Osho Ashram

It's amazing how quickly time goes when you're travelling! I went to Chennai to interview some communications candidates two weeks ago. Always interesting to interview in another culture. When I got back to Delhi the pre-monsoon rains had started, which meant it got a lot cooler.

Then I went to Pune for a three day training. The training was fine - a bit of a bizarre sign greeted us at lunch the first day.... the picture is below. Mankind is a pharma company but you can see the confusion.

The training ended Friday at lunch and since the next flight back to Delhi wasn't until evening, I took the opportunity to spend the afternoon with my former boss, Carol, who was the trainer. She had decided to spend the weekend at Osho Meditation Resort, a famous ashram in Pune. Named after guru Osho, who spent a great deal of his life in the US and is famous/contraversial for his teachings around sex and the fact that he set a guiness record for most Rolls Royces owned?!?

It was really bizarre. And huge- 40 acres. The activities seemed very interesting; meditation, yoga, thai chi, bollywood dancing, etc. But then there's the cult-ish feeling. Everyone must wear maroon robes (you can buy them there) during the day and white robes for the evening meditation (the brochure specified that any dupatta (scarf) worn must be white with no cream) and you'll be asked to leave if you cough. So there are all these strange westerners (and a few indians) walking around silently in matching robes..... weird.

Then there's the fact that they require an on-the-spot AIDS test before you can register. It's annoying for two reasons. 1) what is the message that they're trying to send? I read the brochure and thought of a nice quiet weekend, am I supposed to be having sex? I presume the message is you can participate in free love because everyone here is clean. Which brings me to my real problem with this. 2) they offer no counselling for negative people (testing is a prevention method if you provide counselling to negative people), they ignore the window period which means that anyone who was recently infected won't be picked up. And when you're recently infected is when you are most "contagious". And finally, what about all the other reasons to wear a condom; syphillis, incurable herpes, pregnancy? It's irresponsible.

Anyways, it's a bizarre place- a tiny backpacker's corner in an otherwise normal city.

On another topic I got some amusing feedback at work the other day. I was told that some state teams I work with appreciated that I didn't tell them what to do but couched my feedback in a constructive way. I responded that I was surprised because I think of myself as too critical particularly when compared to my colleague. My boss' response was, "yeah, but they can't actually understand what you're saying and you're body language is upbeat". Ah, language barriers. So much for my helpful advice that no one is understanding!

Oh, an upon returning to Delhi it went back up to 120F. I totally forgot we were only in June.