...[after many colourful exploits, wealthy entrepreneur, Jay Harman, wound up in the Rajneesh ashram in India] ...Harman worked closely with Rajneesh's fiery personal secretary, Ma Sheela, who had earned the moniker "tough *******" after using the phrase in a 60 Minutes interview to dismiss concerns about Orange People taking over a small town near Perth. Over time, Harman found Sheela's outbursts increasing embarrassing, but it was too late. In 1989 he found himself straddled with a $500,000 debt to the Rajneesh Foundation of Australia that Sheela had tricked him into signing.
"It looked like I was never going to be able to wipe my hands of it, so in January 1990 I declared myself bankrupt just to sever it," he says. "The amazing thing was that when I was driving home from the bankruptcy court on that Monday morning, I saw a flyer from a newspaper that Rajneesh had died that day."
Despite his financial losses and his very public falling out with Rajneesh, whom he accused of cleverly exploiting "vulnerable and insecure Westerners", stealing their lives and "reducing many to emotional cripples", he has no regrets. "If I had to live my life all over again I wouldn't change anything - good or bad. I learnt an enormous amount from that experience. "They say 'no pain, no gain' and I'm sure that's true in many ways."
As Harman was putting his life back together, [indian Prince, and at the time world's wealthiest man] Mukarram Jah's was rapidly unravelling. Jah had come to Perth in 1972 to escape the claustrophobic confines of the medieval court that was Hyderabad. His Turkish grandfather, Abdul Mejid, the last caliph of Islam, had wanted him to lead the next caliphate. His Indian grandfather, Osman Ali Khan, wanted him to preserve the family fortune, which included forts, palaces, antiques and more jewellery than was owned by all of India's princes put together.
Instead, at a time when Indira Gandhi had just abolished the Privy Purse (a payment made to the royal families of India's former princely states), Jah found himself being hounded by India's tax authorities, while disgruntled relatives were taking him to court for their share of one of the world's largest inheritances. Fearing for his life and that of his Turkish wife and two children, he sought refuge on a 200,000-hectare sheep station on the Murchison River, 600 kilometres north of Perth.
A graduate of Britain's Royal Military Academy Sandhurst with a peculiar bent for engineering, Jah was less interested in farming or keeping an eye on his valuables back in India than he was in acquiring the biggest bulldozers that money could buy. "The thing with Jah was that he had to amuse himself, to have a project on his mind," recalls David Weinman, who handled Jah's accounts in the 1980s. "And the things he loved most were his two bulldozers, the D7 and the D9 on the station. What he used to like most was when they broke down. That might sound rather stupid, but then it was all action and a mechanic would have to be flown up from Perth to bring the spare parts at great cost in a chartered plane.
"This was the odd thing with the Kalbarrie, too. Jah had to have a project to get up in the morning and say, 'Right I'm going to do it.' If it wasn't repairing the winch, it was the planking, if it wasn't that, it was the engines, and this would keep him occupied."....
