“The commune, visited twice by David Headley, may have been the original target,” writes Sunanda Mehta while investigating the bombing of the German Bakery in 2010. Published in the Indian Express, on February 13, 2025
“A bunch of people swear that they owe their lives to my performance. When that bomb exploded at 7.15 pm on the 13th Feb 2010, I was just about to go on stage, while they were sitting in the audience, a comfortable half-kilometre from where they might well otherwise have been,” says Chinmaya Dunster (74) a renowned sarod player.
Born in the United Kingdom, Dunster became an Osho disciple in 1982 and moved to India in 1989. In 1990, the man who had been inspired to learn the sarod after attending an Amjad Ali Khan concert in Delhi, founded a band with Prem Joshua at Pune’s Osho International Meditation Resort. An active environmentalist who performed concerts to foster awareness for saving ecosystems, Dunster was doing exactly that at the Osho centre on February 13, 2010 when the German Bakery blast happened.
The event was a benefit concert he had arranged to raise funds for solar lighting in the Himalayan village of Jhuni. “The band was ready to go on stage when suddenly we heard from afar an ominously deep and rumbling boom. Probably another gas cylinder exploding somewhere… we re-assured each other. But just as we were about to play, the hostess frantically signally to me. When I went to her she whispered in my ear that there had been a bomb at the German Bakery, and that’s all we knew,” recollects Dunster in a blog he wrote in 2017 on the night that changed everything.
As he realised that no one else seemed to have heard about the blast, he decided to go ahead with the concert. ‘”The Show Must Go On’ reverberated in my head and without further hesitation I got back on stage, picked up my sarod and gave the cue for the opening number,” he says.
Dunster admits though that he doesn’t remember much of what he played that night. But the memory of the police sirens and the ensuing chaos, once the one-hour performance ended and people got to know what had happened, has remained entrenched in his mind.
Speaking to The Indian Express from UK, Dunster, who decided to drive off early in the morning to join his partner Naveena and new-born daughter Koyal in Goa says, “The extraordinary sight at 4 am when I drove off Koregaon Park is indelible in my memory. The roads were absolutely deserted. No human being was there in any direction. It was grey and smoggy. I felt like I was the last person on the planet. It was like trying to escape a destroyed city. Another thing really remarkable to remember was the sense of doom that maybe this is the beginning of something far worse.”
Over the next few weeks though, Dunster received many calls and mails, ‘You saved my life, man! I had been planning to go to the bakery as usual, but went to your gig instead…..’ they all said.
The gratitude was understandable. The blast happened at 7.15 pm. Every day the Osho centre’s gates would close at 6.40 pm for the evening meditation. Many who did not want to join the meditation would typically slip off to catch some coffee and conversation at the Bakery just down the road that was very popular with Osho disciples. That day a lot of that crowd decided to stay back for the concert. “The number of casualties ended up containing just three Osho sannyasin names,” says Dunster.
“Yes the timing of the blast saved many Osho followers,” agrees Ma Sadhana, spokesperson of the Osho centre. “It happened when we also had our white robe evening meditation and a lot of people hence were inside the meditation resort and not at the bakery,” she adds.
While between the concert and evening meditation many sanyasin lives may have been saved, the blast did forever alter the way the Osho commune functioned. And it was not just because of its proximity to the site. Soon after the blast it emerged that David Headley, a Lashkar-e-Toiba operative and an accused in 26/ 11 had planned the German Bakery bombing. Headley had twice visited the Osho commune in 2008-2009.
“The Osho commune could have even been the original target, given that Headley had come here twice and surveyed the place. But because we have CCTVs and our own security making it difficult to bring in bags unchecked, the target must have shifted to another place with international tourists,” says Sadhana.
Security was immediately enhanced at the commune and the height of the bamboo walls raised considerably. A permanent police post just outside the lane, barricades on the road and a scanner at the gate were other preventive measures that have now become the norm at the centre – a marked departure from its earlier relatively easier access.
Or as Dunster says,” The outside world had invaded our little haven and would not be going away…”
Related article
- Pune, 13 February 2010 – Chinmaya remembers the bombing of the German Bakery in Pune, India, a popular meeting point of sannyasins, and his Jhuni Benefit Concert that happened at the same time (February 13, 2018)
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