My Life in Orange

by TimGuest (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.40

  Imagine growing up with 200 mothers and 200 fathers. What would it feel like to dress entirely in orange? What would it be like to grow up in a commune with daily chants, meditation and muesli on the menu? What would it be like to swap your mother for a new orange family? Written in unsentimental prose this is the deliciously funny, and by turns, poignant story of a little boy alone in a house full of orange people.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.25

  In 1981 Tim Guest was taken by his mother to a commune in a small village in Suffolk. It was modelled on the teachings of the famous Indian guru , Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who preached an eclectic doctrine of Eastern mysticism, chaotic therapy and sexual freedom. Both were given Sanskrit names, dressed entirely in orange and instructed to completely abandon their former identities. Tim - or Yogesh, as he was now known - spent the rest of his childhood in Bhagwan's various communes in England, Oregon, Pune and Cologne. While his mother meditated, chanted and ran therapy groups, Yogesh lived a life of unsupervised freedom, occasionally catching glimpses of the strange behaviour of the adults around him. In 1985 the movement collapsed after Bhagwan's arrest and Yogesh was once again Tim, about to start life at a secondary school in North London, alone with the secret of his extraordinary childhood. In his first book, Guest describes the other-worldly experience of growing up in a environment of unsupervised freedom and often disturbing adult behaviour.