On a recent Wednesday morning I drove into the barely contained, organised chaos of Joburg’s inner city, past the taxis and the crowds of morning commuters.
I was looking for the Maharishi Invincibility Institute, an educational institution spanning several building blocks and some brightly coloured basketball courts.
Look up and you will see huge billboards extolling the education to be gained in this neck of the woods. Since inception in 2007 more than 21,000 graduates have been gainfully employed at an average rate of 95% with their combined earnings estimated conservatively at R1.45bn per annum.
The atmosphere inside is vibrant and busy, students throng the stairwells, staff move at pace. I peer into classrooms, where people are studiously focused, on my way to the fifth-floor boardroom where a delicious vegetarian/vegan breakfast is waiting for me — prepared by a lovely chef to whom I am introduced by CEO Taddy Blecher.
There is a sense of calm radiating off Taddy. He appears to be demonstrating “being fully present in the moment”.
He tells me he barely scraped through his actuarial science degree. “I was always exhausted. I was so depressed. There were times where I just couldn’t understand the purpose of life. I wrote the first actuarial exams and failed. Then my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer and told us she had three months to live.
“She had brought us up single-handedly, she was our hero, our rock. She was very, very sick. And then at about 2am one morning, she said, ‘Bugger the doctor, I’m not going to die. I’ve got five children. I’m going to find a way to live.' She’s one of the bravest people I’ve ever met.
I ended up taking all 10 actuarial exams, through the Institute of Actuaries, which is unheard of, and passed all 10 in a period of two years
— Taddy Blecher, Maharishi Invincibility Institute CEO
“Up until then, our family had only used Western medicine. My mom went on a macrobiotic brown rice fast for one month, and then she started eating only locally grown foods and no preservatives, no colourants, no microplastics, none of that kind of thing. We were waiting after three months for her to drop dead, but she didn’t. She is still alive.
“I kept seeing my mother getting stronger, and I’m failing these exams. I’m deeply depressed, exhausted, living on like 10 cups of coffee a day just to stay awake. There’s no purpose in life for me. My mom keeps nagging me, you’re failing, you’re unhappy, depressed. Please, just try to eat my food. After nagging me for months, and then failing my exams again, I said OK to one weekend.”
He suddenly felt energetic. “I became a vegetarian, I went to go learn to meditate again, I hadn’t done it really since I was 10" — they had learnt as a family — “and I was now 24. I started reading copiously about human potential, spirituality, the purpose of life. I was desperately looking for meaning in my life. When I started to meditate everything changed for me. I’ve meditated every single day now for 35 years.
“I ended up taking all 10 actuarial exams, through the Institute of Actuaries, which is unheard of, and passed all 10 in a period of two years. I was doing my honours at the same time, and I ended up being the top actuarial honours student in the country.”
He won the Liberty gold medal and was packed and leaving for a high-flying job in the US when he had an epiphany.
“I realised there are millions of kids like me who hate themselves, who don’t see a future, they’ve got nothing to live for, they don’t know where they’re going, they’re hopeless. I felt we could revolutionise education, that we could change young people’s lives.
“I gave up my job. I went to go work in Alex for 4½ years, and then Soweto. I was in the township every day. We found that the 9,000 kids we taught increased their pass rates by 25% across the board.
“But we were getting hundreds of these kids coming back to see us. They’re saying, I’m so depressed because I’ve walked the streets for like, a year. No-one will give me a job. I’ve got no money to go to university. I don’t know how to start a business, and I’m just hanging in the township with my friends, and I’m bored out of my mind.
“And then one day, getting into the shower, I got this little impetus of an idea. What if we could start the first free higher education institution in the country, the goal being to get them into quality jobs so they could have dignity in their life.
“We started from nothing. No buildings, no books, no teachers, no computers, no software, no accreditations. We wrote to 350 school principals and said: ‘Send us your brightest students who come from difficult backgrounds, and we’ll give them this world-class education, post secondary, and they’ll only have to pay R100 a month. We’ll give them food, books, materials, everything.’ It’s a very entrepreneurial story. We ended up building this first higher education institution from nothing, called the Community & Individual Development Association (CIDA) City Campus.
“Over time, we had some board members who were very conservative. So in 2007 we left and started the Maharishi Institute, with the same vision. We’ve taken 24,000 unemployed youth off the streets. We’ve educated them and placed them into jobs. We placed over 21,000 into jobs. They are top people in all the banks, and all the telcos, the consulting firms and all across the economy.”
What has he learnt? “What I’d say is never give up believing that life is beautiful and other human beings are beautiful and have infinite potential, and that anything can change. Even if you’re scared, you can still create history.”
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