Times of India
30 September 2001
ABHAY VAIDYA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
PUNE: If you want to live for 300 years, you could consider sitting for just one hour a day inside a pyramid doing absolutely nothing. And you needn’t go all the way to Egypt to do so either.
Coming up near Hotel Blue Diamond, in Koregaon Park, is the tallest of the half-a-dozen black Osho pyramids that already exist in the city. Nine storeys high, the Pune Pyramid is set to change the city’s skyline — and maybe its lifeline.
Osho, aka Bhagwan Rajneesh, was fascinated with pyramids and all the esoteric concepts associated with them. His dream was that a massive one be constructed right here in Pune. And that dream is now turning into a reality.
In its present state, the pyramid with aluminium sheets covering its three sides is visible from quite a distance and gleams like shining silver in the sunlight. When completed by the beginning of next year, it will be black – the characteristic colour of all Osho buildings in town.
The pyramid is fully air-conditioned and supported on just four pillars. The flooring is dark green Udaipur marble. There will be no carpets or curtains; there will be indirect indoor lighting, apart from natural light coming in through the wide windows.
“This is the most sacred space for me. I am so happy that I am a part of this construction,” says Osho sanyasin Ma Gatha who is supervising all aspects of the project. Her sentiments are understandable; the pyramid is the piece de resistance of the Osho Commune’s ongoing constructions.
No one wants to let on how much this is going to cost. “I don’t know,” says everyone, including the blue-eyed Gatha, who has a strong European accent but will not give her legal name or talk about her background. “It’s all so irrelevant… All that is the past,” she says, shrugging off queries.
But she is eager enough to talk about her pet project. “Osho wanted a closed meditation hall and he was fascinated with the pyramid. We are constructing this as a new Buddha Hall was on his wish list,” she says.
A “closed meditation hall” was also a good idea to stop complaints from irate neighbours. Osho meditations involve long periods of silence, but they also involve a lot of screaming and shouting, laughter and crying and this did not go down too well with the commune’s neighbours in the elite Koregaon Park enclave.
The whole thing is in a pyramid shape because Osho believed in the pyramid’s potential to deepen meditation. He also believed that if pyramids are used widely, life could be prolonged.
Whatever its mystical properties there is no doubt about its aesthetic appeal, given the genius of the Oshoites to transform their surroundings into places of real beauty.
The pyramid will be surrounded by a water body and access to it will be over a small bridge from one of the commune complexes. A 60-room guest house adjoins the Pyramid. Below it is a massive kitchen constructed to European standards and a capacity to feed up to 5,000 people.
According to Gatha and Prem Richa, Osho wanted the guest house to be called ‘Dharmashala’ and have it host visitors and meditators at the commune. But the commune has decided to call it a “guest house.”
Much of this may sound gibberish to most. But hey, what the heck! If you have the money, why not make life interesting by building pyramids instead of tall (and dangerous) towers? Why not make Pune a city of pyramids, and live longer than the rest of the world!
