Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Sir Oswald Mosley, Edgar Bergen . . . In terms of cultural and historic
significance, perhaps the roster of postindependence politicians
staying there reveals the most about the city's society at the time.
From the Third World came envoys, particularly from Indira
Gandhi's so-called nonaligned nations, until their leaders died or
were assassinated, one by one. And colonial ghosts continued to
wave either bribes or olive branches from the USA, Great Britain,
and, for a long and uneasy period, in Western eyes, the Soviet Union.
Then, in 1960, Albert Hofmann of the Swiss pharmaceutical
firm Sandoz checked into the hotel as a foreign VIP. The
Times
termed his visit an 'extensive tour of India.' He wasn't on official
business, though.
He invented LSD, and was also the chemist who first synthesised
psilocybin, the active hallucinogenic ingredient in magic
mushrooms. With other pioneer trippers, like Aldous Huxley and
even Cary Grant, Hofmann realised that he'd stumbled across possibly
the most important tool man had ever had for exploring states of
consciousness previously known only through the writings and
paintings of mystics. Even Lama Govinda, the German psychologist
who converted to Buddhism and the author of a classic text on Tibetan
hermeticism, agreed that LSD unquestionably benefited humankind,
enabling it to understand what transcendent inner states truly were,
what transformations really meant. Hofmann had begged Harvard
acid guru Dr. Timothy Leary not to advocate irresponsible use of
the drug by just anyone, or in uncontrolled environments.
That
was
dangerous - like urging a five-year-old to take your fully loaded
Stealth bomber for a quick spin on his own. It would also ruin it for
everyone else, Hofmann warned, and he was right.
But in 1960 LSD was still legally available. Hofmann was
presumably searching for the same thing in India that had already
brought his and Huxley's friend, Christopher Isherwood, there to
devote himself to Ramakrishna in later life. Isherwood wrote a fine
book on the Bengali saint. LSD's inventor must also have sought
the same thing that would bring first the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg,
then Timothy Leary's Harvard coexperimenter, Dr. Richard Alpert
- aka Ram Dass - to India a little later in the decade. Alpert/Ram
Dass became a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, then tried being a
