Indian Express
Chandigarh Newsline: Simply C
November 3, 2001
“They’re selling my guru.” Ma Yog Neelam on the conspiracy to commercialise Osho
-Dharminder Kumar
I have known her long enough, nor only in this life, but in other lives also. Her path is absolutely certain: It is love. Through love she is going to achieve. Through love she is going to be. Her direction is absolutely clear: Love is her meditation.
Osho on Ma Yog Neelam
It’s the labour of love Ma Yog Neelam is busy doing these days. They are putting a price on her late guru, and she is resisting it tooth and nail.
In Chandigarh to conduct a meditation camp, Ma Neelam is heading a section of Osho’s disciples who are fighting against Osho being trademarked and copyrighted in the US by members of the Inner Circle who run the Commune at Pune.
“How can they do it? Osho wanted his words to reach the people unhindered. He never wanted royalties. But a few people in New York and Pune are turning Osho into an industry,” she speaks out. “Osho Commune in Pune has undergone crass commercialization,” charges Ma Neelam.
The girl from Ludhiana cam in contact with Acharaya Rajneesh when she was barely twenty years old and happily married to an industrialist. Arguably, she has been the dearest to Osho, and definitely, the closest to him among his disciples. “I was madly in love with him,” she says breezily.
When she was denied entry to the Pune Commune last year she spilled the beans about how some Inner Circle members were stealthily copyrighting Osho in New York and moving the headquarters out of India. She had said that three persons – a Canadian, a British and an Australian, were running the affairs of the Commune in dictatorial manner against the master’s vision.
“The people who are running the Commune are after power and money,” says ma Neelam. She alleges that Ma Shiela had started copyrighting in the US illegally and without Osho’s knowledge during Rajneeshpuram days. She says that Osho had refused royalties even from CBS, Diamond Pocket Books and many others. “Now these people are sending legal notices of copyright infringements to even Osho’s disciples who have been publishing his work for many years,” she says.
But isn’t that a measure of Osho’s failure as a teacher that some of his closest disciples are behaving in such a manner? No. These people were never receptive to Osho. Jayesh (one of the three who are copyrighting Osho’s work in New York) used to doze during Osho’s discourses and rarely did any meditations,” Ma Neelam counters.
“We have dared them by publishing osho’s work in a magazine Osho World which is being published by Osho World Foundation (OWF) from Delhi,” she adds. According to Ma Neelam OWF have also won a legal suit filed against them by the trio in New York for using Osho’s name for a Galleria it has opened in New Delhi. “We will not go to the court. Let them go to court and we will fight,” she says.
