Maharaji: The Boy, The Man and His Moustache

There were always photos of Prem Rawat or Guru Maharaj Ji or Maharaji on the walls of Divine Light Mission halls and ashrams and his most noticeable feature, after you got past his double chins and fat jowls and his greasy pimply skin was the Mahatache. According to the Los Angeles Times he had begun to cultivate it in 1974 but was still easy to miss: "Maharaj Ji, who has recently begun sporting a sparse mustache." It took over a decade to develop and of all the bum fluff (as we so charmingly called teenage wanna be facial hair) that I ever saw, his was the most pathetic. It was embarrassing to have a guru with such a pathetic moustache. It was even derided in the New York Review of Books December 13, 1973: "He sits a few feet from us in his white satin duds, alternately smiling, pouting, and baiting us. There is a faint mustache on his imperious, round brown face. The press has tried to check out a rumor that he's really nineteen going on twenty, and has faked his passport as a lila, to get more attention."

The Radhasoami gurus had magnificent beards and moustaches but one assumed that the Perfect Master, Ultimate Ruler and Lord of the Universe had more important things to concern himself with than his moustache, like peace on earth, the spiritual development of his devotees, the collapse of support for his Divine Light Mission, his disinheritance by his mother and his replacement as Satguru for millions of his Indian followers by his eldest brother.

"it used to be a real pain in the butt to try to keep this mustache, took hours sometime trimming every single hair, just finding each one and getting it just the right way and getting the razor in the right place." - Prem Rawat

So it came as quite a shock to me to learn that in fact he had spent far more time trimming the hairs in his moustache individually than he had time to concern himself with the bigger picture. But as he says, us little humans with our little lives and our little cars, wives, homes and children and full moustaches that require no careful treatment can't be expected to understand the ways of the Master.

"I was looking at a picture of one of the slides, had a moustache and uh we just started talking about it, I said to Marilyn "Should I grow it back again?" She didn't reply but I said one thing I have to say it used to be a real pain in the butt to try to keep this mustache took hours sometime trimming every single hair, just finding each one and getting it just the right way and getting the razor in the right place." One day I remember I was trimming it and trimming it and trimming it and I realized halfway through that I had cut half my moustache off and I got so into detail I had this magnifying mirror at one of the hotel and I got so into it. I just kept clicking closer and closer and closer and before you know 'boom' I looked at the regular mirror and it's like oops. Not so easy, not so easy to be a beggar. Here we are, we spend hours shaving and doing this and doing that you know fixing our hair and putting the lipstick." - Prem Rawat aka Maharaji, Festival of Knowledge, Brussels, 10th December, 1989

Yes, I am being sarcastic but really think about it. Can this boy/man be the Supreme Lord who has come to earth to save mankind with that moustache?

He didn't forget that moustache he remembered it while "giving satsang" in Cancun Mexico in 2012-08-19:4

Some people like to grow beards. This takes effort. I used to have a mustache. Every day, you know, here, here, here, here, here. Some people have really long beards. I mean, they don't cut it at all. But that still takes a lot of effort. You have to comb it. You want to keep it clean, otherwise it'll be like a basket. You could see everything the person has eaten in the last week. Oh, you had that. Oh, you had that. Yeah, so you have to keep it clean. And this is what we look at.

And then finally came the day when his moustache was no longer fluff on his top lip, it was no longer a poor pathetic excuse for a mo' that showed a lamentable lack of testosterone but a real honest to God moustache.

But even then it took quite a lot of work to keep it just so and from some angles it still seemed more then a little pathetic.

The most important reason he kept a moustache was to ensure he wouldn't be mistaken for Jesus as he explained in his birthday celebration in Miami in 1983: "Don't compare me to Jesus. I am not Jesus. If I was Jesus, my name would be Jesus, I would look like Jesus, I would act like Jesus. I don't look like Jesus, I'm not Jesus, I'm not Krishna, I don't look like Krishna, I have a moustache, I'm not Krishna. I'm not Buddha, I don't have those curly hairs, I'm not Buddha. I'm not Ram, I'm not Mohammed."

He spoke about it in Brussels, Belgium 1n 1989. He really was just stating the facts when he said "it used to be a real pain in the butt to try to keep this mustache, took hours sometime trimming every single hair, just finding each one and getting it just the right way and getting the razor in the right place"