Jumbo Hell Flight Home 1972
The years 1971 and 1972 were astonishingly successful for Prem Rawat, then calling Himself Guru Maharaj Ji, with exponential growth (from an initial 5 or 6) as disillusioned youth from the so-called counterculture succumbed to the promises of instant peace and bliss through secret meditation techniques taught in mystic Eastern ceremonies by supposedly celibate, enlightened Indian "Great Soul" Mahatmas and monks. It was a winning combination. In 1972 "the premies outside of India were invited to come and live with him and participate in the annual Hans Jayanti Festival which take takes place in Delhi to honor Shri Maharaj Ji. Eight jumbo jets were being chartered to fly the young Guru Maharaj Ji and 3,500 of his Western devotees to India.
The whole event was stage managed with devotees being shocked to discover that he was not flying with them but they were going on ahead. They would be part of a parade through the streeets of Delhi to the airport where they would line up to greet him on arrival before as many reporters, cameras and onlookers as possible. At that time, nothing was more prestigious to an Indian guru than Western followers. There they would spend the next three days waiting and waiting and waiting.
Fifty years later PatD, a former premie, recalled the airport wait and the three days sitting in the sun at the Ram Lila grounds:
I must say I was severely disappointed to be turfed out of the bell tent I'd hoped to claim a corner of, and dumped out in the open, because the tents were reserved for the ashram sisters first, then the pregnant and so on down the line. The drones (premies with no fame, wealth or a network of powerful premies) had to fend for themselves under makeshift awnings. None of this was made plain beforehand of course, leading to unnecessary ill will and confusion.
The DLM had an unfortunate set of values. Nuns got priority over pregnant women for shelter. Then they loaded all the faithful aboard buses and trucked them 100 miles to Hardwar for a few weeks of dysentery, fever, hunger and heat-stroke and waiting.
Where was Prem? Short answer is fuck knows. Those were the days before he was airborne so it can't have been that far. We all thought he'd be there as Prem Nagar was his house, but not a bit of it. I can't remember now whether it was 2, 3, or 4 times he showed up. Once it was for only around 20 mins before he got back in the car and drove off. I'm sure I wasn't alone in seeing him as a surly spoilt brat on the few occasions he put in an appearance, yet somehow, for reasons that get ever more difficult to grasp as the years go by, I gave him a free pass. I think the predominant atmosphere, or vibe if you like, was one of resigned acceptance with an undercurrent of barely suppressed discontent amongst a minority. I really don't recall anything to do with blissed out and certainly there wasn't any of the hysteria which happened at the festivals of later years. Not even on the very infrequent occasions the main man showed up. Prem Nagar was oddly enough not really strange, just borderline dystopian.
Then they loaded all the faithful aboard buses and trucked them 100 miles back to Delhi airport. The passengers had spent a month in India. They were suffering, in the guru's own words, "diarrhoea, throwing-up, sick, heat-strokes, waking up all of a sudden and finding a rat about a foot long, crawling on top of them. No food, no good food." There had been no emergency medical intervention, people were still sick when they were loaded onto the 747 to London. Pat recalls the journey home.
On the return journey I recall seeing a man standing holding a camel by its bridle at the side of the runway as we sped past, patiently waiting until we'd gone to cross over. Then, when we couldn't have been more that a few hundred feet off the ground the engines went quiet and we sank back down for a few seconds before roaring back up again. That shouldn't have happened; the pilots made a mistake and we almost crashed. Nobody seemed to notice and it came and went so quickly I didn't have time to get alarmed.
A lot of people were very ill before we set off and more and more succumbed as we went on. The toilets started to pack up so eventually there were very few working. The queues were an agony. Somehow there were a few untouched, immaculately dressed and blissed out premies on board who spent the entire flight subjecting the captive audience, i.e the unfortunate stewardesses, to incessant satsang. When we landed in London the plane was quarantined and we sat for ages until a uniformed man appeared at the front. I would guess now that he was a senior police officer and I can still see the expression of concern on his face as he looked down the aisle. I almost wept that finally someone was going to look after us and at the same time ashamed that I was part of it. I heard later from someone whose mother worked at the airport that they couldn't understand how all those people who'd gone out with such fanfare came back so fucked up.
I heard second hand of one or two people who left afterwards, but that's all. I don't think it's possible to know now how many and probably wasn't then either, especially as the new recruits were still coming in numbers sufficient to replace those who'd fallen by the wayside. It wasn't until the end of the following year, after the Houston Millennium, that the flow started to dry up.
Doing Satsang, Service (passing dysentery around with each bowl), Meditation and Darshan at Prem Nagar:
