Please read the life story of MMY. Extracts from LA Times is given below If he was 91 in 2007 and spent nearly 50 years abroad, it makes him 41 yr old when he left India. Being the son of a local tax official he will have lived like the rest of us. Even in late 1960s people were allowed only limited foreign ecxchange to take. That being the case, it takes some doing to go West and influence people their to follow alien practice of "meditation" and build an empire. The influential guru was born Mahesh Prasad Varma, the son of a local tax official in the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Various accounts give the year of his birth as 1911, 1917 or 1918; when he became the Maharishi, he was not inclined to clear up the mystery, saying that age was unimportant.
According to his official biography, he studied physics at Allahabad University and earned a degree in 1942. While in college, he became a student of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, a major leader of the Hindus who was called Guru Dev, or "divine teacher." After graduating from college, he trained under Brahmananda until the guru died in 1953.
Following Guru Dev's death, the Maharishi retreated into the Himalayas for a two-year period of meditation. When he emerged in 1955, he devoted himself to popularizing his master's form of meditation, which was derived from Advaita Vedanta, a branch of Hindu philosophy.
