In July 1989, when journalist Pritish Nandy sent his questions to Osho through Swami Satya Vedant, he was asking about India ahead of the general elections. What came back was something larger, a piercing reflection on what freedom actually means, beyond flags and constitutions.

Osho began with education. The system India inherited from British rule, he said, was built to produce obedient clerks, not painters, poets, or independent human beings. He asked that half of a child's schooling be given to craft and creativity, while subjects like history and geography be left optional, waiting in libraries for those who wanted them. Obedience, he said, is not virtue. It is servitude wearing a polite face.

He spoke often of the individual as sacred, more important than any system built around them. A soldier who dies in war, he said, becomes only a number on a board, though he had a mother waiting, a wife, a longing simply to return home. No society, he felt, should be allowed to swallow that.

Osho rejected centralized power, whether held by governments or corporations, and spoke instead of small communes where power and resources were shared. This, he said, was true socialism. Equal opportunity for everyone to grow, create, and love freely.

He talked, too, for the earth, pointing to vanishing forests, wasted resources, and inventions left unused in government files because someone's profit would suffer if the truth were allowed through.

On women, he was direct: equality could not remain a word. It had to mean real education, real work, and freedom from being treated as anyone's possession. On marriage, he offered his most provocative thought, that love need not be bound by law, and that when it faded, people should be free to part with gratitude rather than bitterness.

And corruption, he said, is never born in a poor man's heart. It is born wherever money and power gather into a few hands. Loosen that grip, he believed, and much of it dissolves on its own.

Nearly four decades later, as India marks eighty years of independence, Osho's manifesto on the world is even more relevant. The insights he offered cannot wait another eighty years to be acted upon.