5 hour energy

On my way back home yesterday, I heard this segment about the man behind the "5-hour energy" drink.

Turns out the guy is an interesting character called Manoj Bhargava, born in Lucknow, who now lives in a Detroit neighborhood. The company behind the drink had sales over 1.2 billion last year. From a Forbes article:

In eight years 5-Hour has gone from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales. Truckers swear by it. So do the traders in Oliver Stone’s 2010 sequel to Wall Street. So do hungover ­students. It’s $3 a bottle, and it has made Bhargava a fortune.

He apparently spent 12 years in an ashram in the middle of his life

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.

Here is some more coverage.