Woodland-2 Letterhead

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This letterhead is the third of Osho's five known letterheads from the Woodland era. It was the last to make any major design changes until Osho moved to Pune. And everything was changed, except his address.

The impetus for change was of course his name change, when he adopted the honorific title Bhagwan. And with "Bhagwan" came two design changes: First we have his name written in western ("Roman") characters done up to look like Devanagari characters, with a shirorekha, or header line, (almost) joining all the letters of each word. The history of this faux-Devanagari style of lettering is not known but we suspect that this may be one of the earliest examples anywhere. It can certainly be observed that this lettering is done by hand, not any kind of typesetting, but more research is needed!

The other completely new design feature is a stylized OM (ॐ), with its smooth, flowing curves squared off and only the newly created corners still slightly rounded, replacing the Jeevan Jagriti Kendra logo for good.

Since Hindi in the letterheads is now finished, these new design features may be intended to evoke an east-meets-west feeling and include Indian sensibilities. Certainly the faux-Devanagari lettering does that, and perhaps this is also the intention of the squared-off ॐ.

In any case, the letterhead reads, in the top left corner:

bhagwan shree rajneesh (all lower-case, in the faux-Devanagari style discussed above, in a slightly toned-down electric blue colour)

And continuing to the right but lower down, in small all-caps the same colour, very similar in style and colour to that of Woodland-1 Letterhead:

A-1 WOODLAND PEDDAR ROAD BOMBAY-26 PHONE : 382184

And above the end of that in the top right corner, the new dark-coloured ॐ logo.

Osho's major period of letter-writing had passed by the time this letterhead came into play, so just two letters and two name-papers using this letterhead have turned up so far:

Letter written on 22 Jul 1971, to Ma Yoga Bhakti
Name-paper Yoga Pushpa 1971 (date is either 12 Aug or 12 Sep 1971), recipient Ma Yoga Pushpa
Name-paper Amrit Bodhidharma 1971 (est date 26 Sep - 2 Oct 1971), recipient Punglia Ji
Letter written on 10 Nov 1971, to Ma Yoga Vivek