Rajesh
Rajesh – Buddhas and stones
It was through his father that Rajesh first heard about Osho. After attending a Mt. Abu camp in 1970 his father returned to the family home in Rajasthan with a small book. Rajesh, at the tender age of 6, could not read the words but, on seeing a photograph of Osho on the cover, the response in the young boy’s heart was ‘This is it. You have found your Master’.
A few years later, in 1975, Rajesh and his younger brother were taken to Poona on vacation and one morning their mother hauled them out of bed to take them to a discourse given by Osho on ‘The Mahagita’. It was too esoteric for the young boys to understand but Rajesh said he enjoyed the jokes and loved gazing at Osho in his white robe. He still remembers the chapals (sandals)! But it was Osho’s gestures and presence that mesmerised him and went deep. When Osho looked directly at him Rajesh said he had an experience of death – and yet also a feeling of magic, a feeling that his feet were not quite touching the ground.
Rajesh posing in front of his shop in Pune with his beautiful statues
During the following years Rajesh visited many other gurus and temples, even churches. His heart was sure about Osho but, as usual, the mind had come in and was creating the usual resistance! However, at the age of 17, Rajesh realised that he couldn’t go any further – it was now suicide or sannyas. In Madhurai at the time, he heard that Osho had just left Poona for the USA which meant he could no longer take sannyas by mail from there. Undeterred he wrote to Osho in Rajneehpuram and got an answer back in 3 weeks with his sannyas name and a mala. He was the only sannyasin in Madhurai and everyone thought he was a joke as Osho was known solely as a ‘sex guru’ in India at that time.
He was still beset with a hunger to be physically near an enlightened master wondering what it would be like to touch and be touched by such a being, but because this was not at the moment possible as Osho was in the USA, he thought about going to another enlightened master. He remembered how Osho used to joke with his sannyasins about visiting J.Krishnamurti, telling them to go to his discourses and sit in the front row wearing orange and the mala. As J. Krishnamurti was visiting Adyar, near Chennai, Rajesh and a sannyasin friend did just that! He remembers feeling luminous and kind of drunk and after the discourse followed J. Krishnamurti to his house.
Suddenly Krishnamurti stopped, came over to him, took Rajesh’s mala in his hand and said ‘Why are you wearing this? Take it off! Use a nice chain instead.’ Rajesh was quite shocked but he was clear that he absolutely would not do that so he went to the discourse the next morning still in orange and still wearing the mala. During the very intellectual Q and A period Krishnamurti suddenly looked at Rajesh and told him to drop sannyas. Again Rajesh was shocked. An enlightened being telling him to drop sannyas? Krishnamurti’s actions made him delve deep into his being and this seemed to crystallise his conviction that Osho was his master and he would not drop sannyas for Krishnamurti. (Was this perhaps exactly Krishnamurti’s aim?!)
He returned to the commune in Poona, meeting his partner Bhagwati in 1984. As Osho had announced, on his arrival in Mumbai in 1986. that he would not go back to Poona, Rajesh went to stay with his father in Rajasthan who set him up with a shop of his own in the cloth business. Just as the business began to do really well, Osho DID go back to Poona and Rajesh immediately told his father he wanted 6 months off. His father was very upset and told him that if he went he could never return so Rajesh went – and worked in the commune until Osho left his body in 1990.
That day was somehow a fulfilment, and completion. As Rajesh had been sent by Keerti to give a press release to a local newspaper he returned too late to go into Buddha Hall so went and stood by Lao Tzu Gate. When Osho’s body was carried from Lao Tzu to Buddha Hall Rajesh was able to join the few people in the small procession and was thus finally able to fulfil his longing to be close to Osho’s body.
As the next months passed, Rajesh started a small business as an ‘accommodation agent’, finding places for sannyasins to stay in Poona and helping them in many other ways. People called him ‘the accommodation therapist’! As a result, he says, he has friends all over the world.
The Galleria Mystica in Pune, India
At the same time he opened his shop, Galleria Mystica, on the north Main Road. Deeply affected by Osho’s book ‘India, my Love’, he and Bhagwati travelled all over India looking for sculptures and sculptors of buddhas because Osho had said that just looking at a Buddha statue inspired people to meditate. When he found talented sculptors, Rajesh brought them to Poona, trained them and started doing business with sannyasins, exporting these sculptures all over the world. No mean feat as many of them are really big.
On one of his trips to Europe, he was listening to a taped discourse – ‘What is Zen?’ – and he heard Osho say that his work would have roots in India but would flower in England so he came to this country, loved it and decided to settle here. This was a very good move as he received help from many people and it soon became obvious that he would be successful. His first move was to have an exhibition at the Nehru Centre in London – entitled ‘India, my Love’– of sculptures and photographs of Indian temples.
Ever creative, his next venture was to import unusual and healing stones and jewellery from India and sell them to ‘mind/body’ shops around the country. He now travels the length and breadth of the British Isles selling the stones to these kinds of businesses. He says he enjoys meeting the people who run these businesses as they are on a similar path to his own.
He spends half his life in England and the other half back in Poona with his wife, Bhagwati, who designs the jewellery and runs the shop and export business in his absence.
Rajesh says that some words of Osho that especially touched him were these: ‘A sannyasin has to leave this planet more beautiful than when he came’. As sculptures are his passion, he is now planning a new project with an Irish sannyasin making meditative sacred Zen gardens with Zen sculptures in Ireland and the UK. This he hopes to expand into his life’s work as a contribution to the planet and a tribute to Osho. How very beautiful!
To contact Rajesh:
Mobile: 07834 361202
Email: rajesh_narang36@yahoo.com
Website: www.galleriamystica.com/sculptures
Text by Veena – August 2007
