Everyone is aware of how Vinod Khanna left the industry at the peak of his career and joined Osho Rajneesh’s ashram. After five years, he again made a return to the industry. When Khanna decided to leave his family, career and go to Osho’s ashram, he was married to Geetanjali Khanna and had two children – Akshaye and Rahul Khanna. However he got divorced once he came back. He then married Kavita. His second wife Kavita Khanna has now opened up on one of the most turbulent phases of Vinod Khanna’s life and the impact on him at Osho’s ashram in Oregon. She also revealed that Osho has asked him to take over the ashram in Pune but he refused. Speaking on her YouTube channel, Kavita reflected on the period when Osho’s followers established a commune in Oregon, a phase later chronicled in the Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. During that time, Osho had largely retreated into silence, she said, leaving day-to-day control in the hands of his secretary, Ma Anand Sheela.“As he became more withdrawn, his secretary (Ma Anand Sheela) took complete control and charge of what was happening. They built a city, and I think they even wanted to win elections. Just crazy things were happening there. They had their own army with, I think, AK-47s or the equivalent. No one could understand what was going on,” Kavita recalled. At that stage, she had not yet met Vinod.Describing Sheela as “tyrannical,” Kavita spoke about the tense and fearful atmosphere within the commune. She recounted that the water supply had been poisoned at one point, leading to Vinod falling ill. “I believe and everyone used to say that she’s tyrannical. 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 be crying, and he couldn’t go back to India because if he did, he wouldn’t be able to return,” she shared.According to Kavita, Vinod’s exit from Oregon happened just in time. “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.”But returning to India did not immediately bring peace. Kavita revealed that Vinod was deeply shaken by what he had experienced. “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 shared that Osho had once invited Vinod to take over the Pune ashram — an offer he ultimately 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.”Earlier, in a conversation with Loveena Tandon, Kavita had revealed that Vinod’s spiritual journey began during an intensely painful personal phase. “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 said.Despite his spiritual immersion, Vinod continued to honour his professional commitments. Kavita noted how he balanced cinema and ascetic life simultaneously. “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.”
