A selection (in three slide shows) of Prabhat’s photos taken in Rajneeshpuram.
When it was time to leave the Ranch, I looked around my room trying to decide what to take with me from all the stuff I had accumulated.
I sat for a while in the centre of the room and then, as if resolved before I even knew it, got up, packed some clothes and told friends who were still around that they could take anything they wanted as I was gonna leave it all behind.
Everything – including my Osho robe, slide projector and all the slides I’d shot on my Leica during the first year and a half of my time there.
We left, Pratima and I, through a fierce blizzard with a small suitcase and intense longing.
I’d had my Leica with me when I joined the astounding bold experiment our beloved Master had conceived, and I had used it at times: on a day off when we packed a picnic basket and drove out to the pine forest, or when we went swimming in the river. I used it on the truck farm, Surdas, where I worked, and during the First Annual World Celebration when I’d been given the job of lighting the new Mandir to facilitate filming. At Cow Camp under snow, at B-site while with my beloved Nandan, and on drive-by.
I used Kodak mailers, sent the rolls of exposed film by mail to be developed. These were posted back to me and I viewed the slides on my Kodak carousel projector. Now it had all vanished and become a dream soon to be forgotten.
But life wanted me to have some of it back. Mostly rejected slides that had been thrown carelessly into the case of the projector, that years later when I was in New York, Bhora, who had taken some of the stuff, gave me back. Others that I must have given to Nandan surfaced on the Rajneeshpuram Residents Facebook group.
These images, imperfect as they are, contain the heart of a young man, totally committed to the creation of a grand show and totally in love with the part written for him, with all the friends around him and with his Master.
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