Beyond the Spectacle of <i>Wild Wild Country</i>
When Netflix’s hit series debuted in March, friends who know about my upbringing began messaging me. They wanted to hear what I thought about the documentary, which centers on the so-called cult my mother once belonged to. Even if I had wanted to skip the show, it’d have been impossible to avoid all the articles about the group’s leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He stared at me from news sites with the same eyes I’d seen on book covers in my mother’s apartment—after she returned from his ashram in India, and before she left our family a second time to follow him to Oregon, where much of takes place. Though mymother made her way back into my life when I was in high school and we now have a close relationship, I never wanted to think about Bhagwan again. But a couple of weeks after the documentary’s release, I braced myself and sat down to watch.
