FOR a bhagwan who claims he will free mankind from kaliyug, the shift from a mundane life to godhood is a tale by itself. When a son was born to S. Varadarajulu Naidu, a rich Telugu farmer of Natam village in Tamil Nadu, on March 7, 1949, little did he know that he would grow up to become a cult figure. The signs of sainthood, in fact, eluded the father altogether till a school-friend recognised it years later.
Naidu, who owned some property in Nemam village on the outskirts of Madras, soon shifted there with his two other sons, Ravi and Ramesh, who now run the Kalki trust, and a daughter Lakshmi. Then, the family moved to Perambur for the sake of the children's education. Vijayakumar enrolled at Don Bosco School where he met his disciple-in-chief, R. Shankar. While school authorities say Vijaya-kumar was a mediocre student, Shankar, now rechristened Shankara Bhagawat, claims that if he kept to himself it was because "he was preoccupied, thinking about the welfare of humanity." Vijayakumar graduated in Mathematics, and took up a job as a clerk with LIC.
Conforming with the Naidu tradition, he married a relative, Padmavathi, in 1975. His job at LIC took him to Coimbatore where he tried to set up a primary school in vain. The turning point came in 1982, when his school-friend Shankar returned from West Germany after a post-doctoral research in physics. Both the friends chose an obscure little town, Satyaloka, in Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh to open an English-medium school. In 1990, at Satyaloka itself, Vijayakumar metamorphosed into "god". Recalls Shankar: "In a mystical experience, students, teachers and parents sensed that bhagwan was visiting their souls to solve their problems." In 1993, when the cult acquired enough devotees, Vijaya-kumar, who now calls himself Bhagwan Kalki, moved to Nemam in Tamil Nadu. He had decided to go back to his roots—and preach.