Osho asked Vinod Khanna to take over his ashram, actor refused; fell ill after consuming poisoned water: recalls wife Kavita

Kavita described Sheela as “tyrannical” and shared that at one point, the water supply of the Oregon ashram had been posioned, due to which Vinod fell ill. “Then there was the whole issue of the water supply being poisoned, and Vinod had fallen ill. So there was a lot of fear. And it wasn’t just fear for him. For him, a very, very critical issue was that he hadn’t seen his children. He used to tell me that he would just cry, and he couldn’t go back to India because if he did, he wouldn’t be able to return,” she shared.

According to Kavita, it was fortunate that Vinod left before the commune’s dramatic collapse, “Luckily, his cousin came and got him out before the whole thing fell apart. Then Osho was arrested, and Sheela was arrested. Sheela, of course, stayed in jail.”

Vinod Khanna refused to take charge of Osho’s Pune ashram

Talking about the time when Vinod left Oregon and returned, Kavita said he was in deep shock and struggling with trauma. “When he left Oregon, he was very, very traumatised, not just internally, but it showed externally as well. He told me that he would go on set, deliver an amazing shot, come back into his van, and then just sit there weeping and weeping.”

She also mentioned that Osho had once offered him the opportunity to take charge of the Pune ashram, but he declined. “When Osho came back from Oregon, he came to Delhi. Vinod drove him to Manali. They spent a month there. Then, when they returned, Osho told Vinod that he wanted him to take charge of the ashram in Pune. Vinod said that, for the first and only time, he said no to his guru. And that was it. Vinod never met Osho after that. He went back into the film industry and was doing extremely well.”

Also Read | Vinod Khanna meditated naked at Chowpatty Beach, worked as gardener at Osho Rajneesh’s ashram: ‘After 5 death in family, he left Bollywood’

Earlier, Kavita had also revealed that Vinod’s close association with Osho began during an especially painful period in his life. “I think he started listening to Osho’s discourses, as they went through a terrible period in their lives, with five deaths in the family, including people who were particularly close to him, like his mother. When his mother died, he went to the ashram and took sanyas. That’s how that journey began,” she told Loveena Tandon.

In the same conversation, she described how Vinod balanced his thriving film career with his spiritual commitments: “Most people don’t know that for three years, while completing the films he had already signed, which included super hits like Hera Pheri and Qurbani, where he looked his absolute best, he would come and shoot. If the shoot was on location, he’d be there, but his base was Pune. He had a room in the ashram that was just four feet by six feet. Osho even joked about it in his discourses, saying the room was so small that he had to step over the bed and sleep diagonally because there was barely any space. He literally had to step over the bed to enter the room.”