Manoj Bhargava claims to be the richest Indian in America. And how did he become so rich? By selling a 5 hour energy drink!
Bhargava was born in India in the prosperous northern city of Lucknow. His parents were well-off, with a villa surrounded by lush, award-winning gardens. They left for America in 1967, so his academic publisher father could get a Ph.D. at Wharton. The family landed hard in West Philadelphia in a third-floor, $80-a-month walk-up with threadbare carpets on seedy 47th Street. They went from having servants in India to splitting one Coca-Cola four ways as a treat.
Teenaged Bhargava excelled at math. “It’s like in Good Will Hunting,” he says, raising a hand to mime Matt Damon’s chalkboard scrawl of algebraic equations in the film. “You see stuff or you don’t. I just see it.” He had no tuition money, but connived his way into interviews at competitive Philadelphia schools, offering to take math tests to prove himself.
Bhargava says he spent his 20s traveling between monasteries owned and tended by an ashram called Hanslok. He and his fellow disciples weren’t monks, exactly. “It’s the closest Western word,” he says. “We didn’t have bowler haircuts or robes or bells.” It was more like a commune, he says, but without the drugs. He did his share of chores, helped run a printing press and worked construction for the ashram. Bhargava claims he spent those 12 years trying to master one technique: the stilling of the mind, often through meditation. He still considers himself a member of the Hanslok order and spends an hour a day in his Farmington Hills basement in contemplative silence. But whatever it is, it has made him a billionaire through a drink that most people have not even heard of but which truck drivers in the US swear by!
And what is in that drink: 5-Hour Energy’s ubiquitous bottle is no beauty, with its shrink wrap and crudely silhouetted running man (his name is Steve, by the way). Inside the bottle: 4 calories, zero sugar, “a blend of B-vitamins, amino acids and nutrients,” and “about as much caffeine as a cup of premium coffee,” according to 5-Hour’s website. A 2010 test by independent reviewer ConsumerLab.com found vitamin levels thousands of times higher than recommended daily allowances and 207mg of caffeine—a massive amount per ounce, but less than the 260mg in a Starbucks tall coffee.Bhargava says he spent his 20s traveling between monasteries owned and tended by an ashram called Hanslok. He and his fellow disciples weren’t monks, exactly. “It’s the closest Western word,” he says. “We didn’t have bowler haircuts or robes or bells.” It was more like a commune, he says, but without the drugs. He did his share of chores, helped run a printing press and worked construction for the ashram. Bhargava claims he spent those 12 years trying to master one technique: the stilling of the mind, often through meditation. He still considers himself a member of the Hanslok order and spends an hour a day in his Farmington Hills basement in contemplative silence. But whatever it is, it has made him a billionaire through a drink that most people have not even heard of but which truck drivers in the US swear by!
The exact formula remains a secret. And so it should. Otherwise Manoj would not be the richest Indian in the US, would he?
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