The Sunday I spend at the Osho Commune in Pune, the lunch is a mix of English, Italian and Indian food. I do not bother to read the menu put up outside the large Mariam Restaurant there that comfortably seats 1,500. Because I already know it. Earlier in the morning, I had spent time in the Commune�s main kitchen watching a rag-tag assembly of 50-odd sanyasins, including seven cooks, preparing the lunch. Besides, my vision is arrested by the sight of several hundred sanyasins (all dressed in maroon) meditating over their food under bobbing sun umbrellas in this open-air restaurant. Is this grace before meals or nirvana, I wonder, as I make for the groaning table on which the buffet lunch is spread out.

The kitchen is called the Zorba Kitchen. But Ma Prem Nyuka, a Belgian sanyasin who runs it with the expertise of a Cordon Bleu chef, tells me that the kitchen is half Zorba, half Buddha... whatever that means. �The Zorba half represents sensuousness, and the Buddha half enlightenment,� she says with a great air of mystery.

Now as I ladle shepherd�s pie, caprese salad and mixed vegetable korma onto a black plastic plate in the Mariam Restaurant, I try to figure out which part of my meal is sensuous and which is enlightening. But I fail. However, I find happiness... in the dessert. The biggest, juiciest and sweetest slice of watermelon I have ever had.

I am told that fruits and vegetables are grown organically for the Commune by farmers outside Pune. �We maintain international standards of hygiene everywhere, especially in the kitchen and restaurants,� Nyuka tells me meaningfully. And since the Commune is a mix of cultures, colours and nationalities, the delicate foreign tummies are also kept in mind; the food is not very spicy, it is very healthy, low calorie in content and almost oil-free.

Care is even taken with the water fountains, which are fed by the Commune�s own bore wells, and are tested eight times a day for contamination. As is the food itself, for which Nyuka gets feedback from the sanyasins even as she is planning and supervising the next day�s meals.

Also supervising the sanyasins doing voluntary work in the kitchen is the late godman Osho himself. His presence is everywhere in the Commune. In the form of framed photographs on the walls and roofs, and sculptures in the gardens, always gazing benevolently upon his flock.

I feel as if his hypnotic eyes are following me about the place. From the kitchen to the bakery, which is really a tree-house like what Enid Blyton used to write about in her story books. The baker is an ancient sanyasin with a long, flowing beard and monkey cap on his skull. His name is Nisargam, and Nisargam is a dead ringer for Osho.

While I am visiting, Nisargam is baking pumpkin cake, and the aroma is so disturbing that a friendly peacock dances a jig impatiently on the balcony outside. On a wall in the bakery, Nisargam has hung up the legend: �Baking is a good meditation. Put your love into it, your whole awareness into it... A very small work like baking can be of tremendous joy because food is very deeply connected with love.�

He tells me this has been written by Osho in his book Dance Your Way To God. I tell Nisargam that he is indeed on the right path, and that Osho must be delighted with him. He looks at me disbelievingly. Love is definitely in the air, I assure him, because his bakery smells like my mother�s kitchen during Christmas week. And it is a smell I will take back with me.

Despite the hygiene and great love with which the food has been prepared, my lunch is not really gourmet stuff that afternoon. I have eaten better. But it is certainly the purest vegetarian food I have come across in a long time.

Meat and alcohol are not consumed on the Commune at all. Instead, diets are supplemented by unfertilised or vegetarian eggs. And tofu and soya chunks substitute as meat. Outsiders cannot join in these meals. Not even those visitors to the Commune who have come from far and wide. Only participants in the many courses the Commune has to offer can eat here. It was the Zorba Kitchen that had drawn me to the Commune. It is a fascinating place where sanyasins are at work almost 24 hours a day, cooking for the 1,500-2,000 others that are at any time of the year part of the Osho movement here.

In high season, Nyuka tells me, the participation in the Commune goes up to 5,000 at least. The highest they recorded was 15,000! This is between September and March, when the cold sets in the West, and foreigners in search of the true meaning of life come knocking on Osho�s doors in Pune. The Zorba Kitchen can do all kinds of cuisines, but it specialises in Indian, Italian, French, German, Mexican and Chinese. When there are Japanese and Korean sanyasins at the Commune, a separate kitchen and restaurant is opened up for them to cook and eat their food. Other nationals wanting to create their own dinners are also invited to do so.

Otherwise the Zorba Kitchen feeds the Commune through the Mariam Restaurant, the Meera Bistro, the Basho Restaurant, the Osho Cafe and two capucino bars. I do not think even the Taj Group of Hotels has so many outlets in one single property anywhere in India.

I am taken on a tour of the Zorba Kitchen by Nyuka and Ma Richa, the PRO of the Commune, and the best way I can describe the kitchen is by saying that it is huge. It resembles something between a five-star main kitchen and that of an in-flight catering service. And everything about it is huge and spanking clean.

There are giant-size cutters of vegetables in all assorted shapes. A sink that is like a mini-size swimming pool. Chopping boards that appear to be football field lengths and a gigantic processor (a kadhi mixer) that resembles an anti-aircraft gun. �We call it the elephant�s trunk,� Nyuka tells me proudly.

The cooks begin their chores at 6 in the morning to prepare the day�s meals. Breakfast is served between 7 and 10 a.m., lunch between 12.30 and 2 p.m., early dinner between 4.30 and 5.30 p.m. and the late dinner, after the last discourses and meditation sessions are over, between 8 and 9 p.m. Gourmet snacks are available almost 24 hours at the Basho Restaurant and Osho Cafe.

The Commune takes the effort to see that it makes its meals and their presentations as authentic as possible. When the occasional Japanese meal is prepared, for example, it is served in wooden shokado Japanese lunch boxes. All the meals are transported from the kitchen to the restaurants by those battery-operated buggies you find at beach resorts in Goa taking guests from the lobby to their rooms.

The Zorba Kitchen has a staff of about 50, and of these, several are pressed into the service areas in the restaurants, bistro and bars. All of them are volunteers and in the course of their involvement (they don�t like to say �work�), have come to learn how to cook and bake. Like Swami Veetraj, an artist and painter from Ludhiana, who has been with the Commune for 12 years and is considered one of the more gifted chefs of the Zorba Kitchen.

Working here is an awareness lesson,� he tells me while stirring a spinach and cashew salad in a huge stainless steel bath-tub with what looks like a garden shovel. �The food I cook is like that served in a restaurant. It is authentic. Sometimes, it is fusion. And the recipes we follow are all originals donated by the sanyasins of the Commune.� He learnt to cook by watching and helping the others and now virtually runs the Zorba Kitchen.

It is no miracle for somebody with no formal catering college background to come and cook well in the Zorba Kitchen,� says Swami Jitendra Bharti who, despite being an electronics engineer and a computer expert, prefers to specialise in the kitchen. �The Osho cook has to be a mathematician,� he says surprisingly. �Because, everything, almost the whole cooking process, is done on computer. It is possible for even a Gujarati housewife to cook for 1,000 people, because the set-up is like that.�

And it is true. Swami Jitendra has created a computer database for the Zorba Kitchen of over 2,500 recipes. He has sourced these from sanyasins who have been in the Commune earlier, who are there now, and from books. �The recipes are precise,� he says, �down to the ingredients, the quantity and whether the vegetables have to be sliced, grated or chopped. The whole process is simplified and put down in step-by-step method.

It is like cooking through a computer. It is so mechanised, so systemised, that anyone can jump into the kitchen and volunteer to cook. All you need is a printout to follow the instructions and a definite feel for food.� He, himself, is a hands-on cook, and turns out at the Zorba Kitchen every once in a while. �Cooking is a luxury, a form of meditation for me,� Swami Jitendra says.

The other sanyasins who have been involved with the Osho Commune for long and who have designed and built the Zorba Kitchen, are Swami Deva Kuteer and Swami Videha, both technical men and expert designers, but closet cooks too. Swami Kuteer began cooking in the Commune in 1997. Since then, he has helped Swami Jitendra in writing the recipes out for the computer and Swami Videha in the actual planning of the kitchen. Of the food prepared there, he says: �We have learnt to camouflage the tastes to suit the tastes of sanyasins from all over the world.�

Before we built the Zorba Kitchen, food was being prepared here like it is done at those makeshift wedding pandals,� exclaims Swami Videha. Here his expertise and knowledge came into play. Somebody remembered that he used to run a vegetarian restaurant (called Zorba The Buddha) in Germany and drew him into the F&B operations and controls at the Commune in 1980. �I was cooking for 50 sanyasins one day and 5,000 the next!� says Swami Videha.

So he drew up a plan for the new kitchen, convinced the Commune that gourmet food could only be presented through a designer kitchen, formed a team and went into action. �Now we are working on a futuristic kind of state-of-the-art kitchen,� reveals Swami Videha. �It will be well-planned and proper, like I always wanted a kitchen to be, and exactly like the kitchens in the new Sidewok and Frangipani restaurants in Bombay. Only we are not in the five-star business. We are into meditation.�