Hira Ratan Manek, a Retired Engineer from India
Hira Manek has, since 2000, become the best-known promoter of sungazing in the Western world, and particularly in the USA and Canada. He has been a relentless proselytizer of and missionary for the practice of sungazing, and he is what I consider to be a fanatic and fundamentalist who regularly engages in gross exaggerations about the safety of sungazing and the various health and well-being benefits which he claims that it will impart to practitioners. Two or three other sungazing promoters from India have also become somewhat well-known in the West since the early 2000s as well; the best-known of them is likely Sunyogi Umasankar, and you will find a section devoted to Umasankar immediately below this section.
The Times of India and other Indian newspapers, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, featured several stories about a retired Indian male engineer and factory owner (more about this later) in his early 60’s named Hira Manek (aka HRM; his last name is sometimes mis-spelled in news reports as Matek or Manak), who was claimed (at the time of the publication of the articles) to have been on a sun-only “dietary fast” – consisting of sungazing for hours per day – for over 7 months, and under strict medical monitoring to ensure that he really was not eating any food. The Times of India articles --- there are now more than one -- are apparently still available on the Times of India website (link to main page: _http://www.timesofindia.com), but the exact web page addresses for the articles seem to change regularly! Basically, from about 2001 onward, Hira Manek claimed that he had not eaten solid food in three years, and by late 2003, he was claiming to have abstained from eating solid food for over seven years (in fact, when I met him in October 2005, he cited the seven year figure) and by early 2005, he was claiming that he had continually abstained from eating solid food for 10 years. Rather, he claimed that he drank only one to two liters of water per day, plus several cups of tea to which some buttermilk and sugar had been added.
More recently, as of 2003, Hira Manek started spending a good part of each year in the United States and Canada, and, for a while, headquartered for about half of each year at the estate of an India-born Hindu supporter located in Orlando, FL, and he used this as a home base for his lectures on sungazing across the USA and Canada. By 2003, Hira was claiming that he had had abstained from ingesting solid food for seven years. Interestingly, Hira has been studied several times by researchers both in India and in the West; in each case, the studies appeared to have proven Hira's claims about being able to survive for protracted periods of from 200 days to 410 days without eating solid food. Hira Manek has also claimed that he has been studied by scientists performing research for NASA, but there has been some controversy regarding the veracity of this claim. If you are interested in reading the observations made of Hira Manek by a Western-trained neurologist from India who examined him and monitored him closely during a prolonged supervised fasting study, please see an article by Dr. Sudhir V. Shah on this website.
From mid-2003 onward, as Hira Manek spent a good part of each year touring the US and Canada while delivering lectures proselytizing the practice of sungazing, often staying at the homes of local students and disciples, stories started dogging Hira Manek in his wake, with some persons who had hosted him or sponsored his lectures claiming that they had caught him eating food on the sly, often late at night. Hira steadfastly denied all these claims. The volume and frequency of such tales increased steadily, and in fact, when one Texan supporter who had hosted him in 2004 reported also having caught Hira eating (this time at an Indian buffet restaurant), Hira and some of his close supporters not only denied the allegations as fabrications, but they engaged in what -- from my vantage point and that of other observers -- amounted to an attempt at character assassination on the man who had made the claims. In fact, years later, in early 2007, after some scandals had long since broken regarding Hira and his long-denied eating binges, one of his East Coast female disciples who had been instrumental in trying to impugn the reputation of the Texas man who had reported catching Hira binging on food, called me to tell me that she had left his inner circle and that she felt very remorseful about the role she had played in attempting to defend Hira Manek.
At the same time that Manek was busily denying that he was clandestinely eating solid food, he was also investing considerable energy in attacking another Indian-born sungazing guru, Sunyogi Umasankar, who had been claiming that he (Umasankar, that is) had been inedian (i.e., not eating) for long periods of time; Hira Manek claimed that it was a well known fact that Umasankar ate food regularly and that Umasankar was therefore a fraud. Manek claimed to be quite infuriated by this alleged deception on Umasankar's part.
By early 2005, tales of clandestine eating binges continued to plague Hira Manek and he and his disciples continued to deny these stories vehemently, insisting that Manek had abstained fully from eating all solid food for 10 years. Indeed, by this time, Manek had become somewhat of a joke among insiders in the sungazing world, both for his relentless missionary-like proselytizing of the practice of sungazing and for the trail of rumors that followed him about his imputed eating binges; there were many jokes afloat at the time in the sungazing world in this regard about Manek and Indian buffet restaurants. Finally, in July 2005, while Hira Manek was delivering a series of lectures on sungazing in San Francisco, a well-known professional filmmaker (who had been making a documentary film on sungazing for several years) and his crew followed Hira Manek into an Indian buffet restaurant in San Francisco and filmed him binging on food. When confronted on camera, Manek tried to deny that he had been eating and offered a number of astounding prevarications in an attempt to explain his predicament. He continued to deny eating food clandestinely for a short while longer, as even more reports began to surface of his having been caught eating surreptitiously. Ultimately, within a few weeks of the San Francisco debacle, Manek issued several statements admitting that he had been clandestinely eating for at least a year (many believe that it was far longer than that, given the volume of stories which followed him in his travels) and claiming that he had lied only to protect his cherished cause of sungazing, and maintaining that he had not lied for personal reasons. As of September 2007, Hira Manek and his followers have once again returned to the not-eating theme, claiming that he has not eaten solid food in over one year.
Incidentally, in addition to the mystery and ambiguity which has attended Hira Manek's claims of having been inedian (at least in terms of abstaining from solid food) for many years and his equally-dubious claim of having been studied by NASA scientists, a new area of ambiguity has emerged regarding Manek, as follows: In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, media reports uniformly referenced Manek as being a retired engineer who had been a wealthy owner of an industrial factory until he had reportedly turned over his factory and his wealth to his employees and others so that he could start to promote sungazing around the world. In fact, when I met Hira Manek in October 2005 in Virginia, this is the exact tale which he related to me at that time about his earlier life in India. However, I note that starting in the year 2006, media articles about Manek and press releases from his camp suddenly began to refer to him only as a retired spice trader from India. In fact, I have twice received calls since mid-2006 from close disciples of Manek (who were largely trying to urge me to aid them in promoting Hira Manek's lectures...) who told me that he was, to their knowledge, never a degreed engineer nor an industrialist in India, and that rather, he had been a spice trader.
I was hardly surprised when the well-documented stories started to emerge in July 2005 about Hira Manek's clandestine eating; the rumors had been too plentiful and too substantial -- and too-well corroborated -- for too long for anyone who knew Manek to really believe that he did not eat solid food at least occasionally. In the aftermath of Manek's exposure as a fraud, a number of persons in the sungazing world expressed shock and dismay at his deception, while I continued to point out that the larger and more important problem, from my point of view, was that Manek was a fundamentalist and a fanatic (can you tell that I tend to be allergic to both?) and that he was continuing to proselytize sungazing, making all kinds of grossly untrue claims about its safety (claiming that it was a safe practice for everyone) and for its purported benefits, to the extent that sungazing had become the latest fad in many segments of the New Age world and the yoga world in Western countries. Indeed, I pointed out at the time that it is such fanaticism and fundamentalism which leads to desperate acts such as the deception and denial in which Hira Manek had engaged for years.
