Wild Wild Country – A Review

“We are materialist spiritualists, nothing like this has ever happened in the world, this is a new experiment, new beginning and it has great future for it.”

In a beautifully architected documentary series, Maclain Way and Chapman Way narrate the rise and fall of a cult that Rajneesh Osho calls ‘a failed experiment’.

With increasing international followers and irking the then Indira Gandhi’s government in his discourses it became necessary for Bhagwan, as they address him, to lookout for a new country to set up his ashram.

With the interviews of a balanced set of individuals involved in the ‘Rajneesh Movement’, the locals who were against him setting up the ranch in Oregon, the highest-ranking individuals of the movement who were with Osho till the end and who left the movement with Ma Anand Sheela and the federal officials who were heading the investigation, the documentary unfolds the story of the beginning and the official end of ‘Rajneeshism’ in 6 well-assembled chapters.

The unfolding of events through interviews, actual footages and sketches where footages were not available kept me hooked to the plot throughout and there is no phase in the series that made me realise the time I spent glued to the screen.

Even though I had read the news about the frauds, crimes and arrest of Rajneesh Osho, this documentary explains, in a very honest way trying not to influence the viewers, that there were a whole lot more events including the ‘Sannyasins’ converting a deserted country land of 65k acres to a huge city with all the urban infrastructure like roads, restaurants, hospitals, farmlands, an airstrip with a fleet of airliners called as Air Rajneesh and a reservoir with a fire department and a police force, called the Peace Force, possessing more sophisticated arms than the police force of the whole state of Oregon to how the immigration frauds and a bioterror attack were made to manipulate the elections to have their representatives in the state council and how the hunger and greed for power inside the commune lead to his arrest and deportation.

This documentary is a must-watch. The whole documentary is about the leadership and the power struggle in the commune, it's beginning, rise and downfall and not about Rajneesh Osho’s vision or teaching. His vision of creating an energy centre through meditators and his discourses which influenced millions to follow him and be in his physical presence is a small but prominent part of the documentary.

“I am not special in any sense. I am not claiming that I am the son of God. I am simply saying one thing: that I was asleep, now I am awake. You are asleep and you can be awake also. I will go on trying to help people to be awake. The awakened man will be the new man. He will not be Hindu, he will not be Christian, He will not be Mohammedan. He will not be Indian, he will not be German, he will not be English, he will simply be an awakened being.”

Directed By: Maclain Way and Chapman Way

Distributor: Netflix