Haidakhan Baba: My Years with the Himalayan Mystic

Well-entrenched in Hinduism is the belief that God sometimes descends to earth as an avatar, the manifestation of a deity that has assumed human form for some divine purpose. We may also define an avatar as an incarnate divine teacher. Haidakhan Baba qualifies as an avatar on both counts. He appeared out of a cave in 1970 at the Haidakhan village, seemingly out of nowhere, and went on to touch and transform the lives of millions of devotees.

As a teenager, Vijay Gupta spent some years with H...