Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 25, may have been sitting next to you sipping coffee in a Mumbai or Pune restaurant and you may not even have known.
Zuckerberg, whose immensely popular social networking site has thousands of fans in India, was recently in Pune, visiting the Osho commune, among other places.
His quiet visit to the Osho International Meditation Resort, as the commune is known, stirred intense excitement among the controversial guru’s followers who are preparing to mark his 20th death anniversary on January 19.
“The millions of hits on Osho on the internet and numerous references on Facebook seemed to have evoked Zuckerberg’s curiosity and he visited the commune a few days ago,” Amrit Sadhana, a senior member of the resort’s management, told DNA.
Zuckerberg, who flew to the US on Tuesday, posted a cryptic note on his Facebook account on December 30: “I’m in India this week for vacation. I’ll be attending a good friend’s wedding and checking out a few cities while I’m here.”
The post accompanied a picture of Zuckerberg with a friend and a child posing with an elephant on Pune’s North Main Road, which leads to the Osho commune and the Jewish Chabad House, both destinations visited by American terror suspect David Coleman Headley in July 2008 and March 2009.
“He is in India for a week on a vacation to attend the wedding of a friend in Pune, who works for Facebook,” Gitika Kapur,
Facebook’s senior account executive, told DNA from Delhi.
Declining to reveal which cities Zuckerberg visited during his brief stay in India, she said he was on a private visit and stayed in Pune for a week. “He left for the US on Tuesday,” she said.
