An old video of Vinod Khanna has been doing rounds on social media where he can be heard talking about his experience at the Osho Ashram and his sex life.
In the video, uploaded on the Instagram page of Bollywood Direct, he can be heard saying:
Well, I was a bachelor and I am no saint as far as women are concerned. I need sex as much as anybody else does. Without women we won’t be here, without sex we won’t be here, so why should anybody object to my being with women.
It is notable that Vinod left his career when he was at the peak, to join Osho at his Ashram in Pune. And the viewers of Wild Wild Country will know that Osho also had an Ashram (or I should say city) in the US. Vinod went there too.
Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt once spoke about the same and said:
I was instrumental in taking him to the Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh ashram, as he was known those days. He was yet to rechristen himself as ‘Osho’. He started reading his books and listening to his discourses on tapes. Finally, we both became sanyasis. We both would be saffron-clad those days.
Even Vinod Khanna’s son, Akshaye Khanna, spoke about his father’s time at the Ashram and told Mid-Day:
One doesn’t look at it like that at five. Osho had nothing to do with my thoughts about why my dad wasn’t there. That came much later.
Vinod Khanna was called “a deep meditator” by an ashram spokesperson.