He ends up trashing Indian neurologists, the defence department, the media and the public for even entertaining this stupidity. Happy? This is what happens when you believe and spread stories that fly in the face of all reason — people will treat you as a laughing stock.
I had thought that it would be obvious to anyone how such a claim is impossible. But I have found dozens of answers talking about him among “amazing facts about India”, “greatest mystery of all time” and so on. And some of those answers receive hundreds of upvotes, invariably from Indians. The mind boggles.
There are people saying that he gets his energy from the sun. Let us see how implausible this is.
Solar energy reaching the earth is about 1.3 kW/m². Prahlad Jani looks like this:
Covered like that, there cannot be more than 0.1m² area that is exposed to the sun. If we assume that he sunbathes for an hour every day dressed like that, he would be exposed to a total of 468kJ solar energy.
How much of that can he “convert”? Forget for the moment that he has no chlorophyll to photosynthesise. I mean, he does not look like this,
does he?
Even if he were converting energy like a plant, no luck. Photosynthesis is a very low-efficiency process.
Leaves cannot even collect 10% of the light falling on them usually. This would mean that Jani photosynthesis would store 50kJ energy maximum in a day. Also, note that such high efficiencies only occur at low energies and plants typically only use 10% maximum solar intensity. This would drop the energy storage by another factor of 10, and we end up with 5kJ of energy.
Now, how much energy does a typical human need?
The energy expenditure at rest is known as the basal metabolism rate.
This is essentially the energy you need simply to run the organs without any additional expenditure on exercise etc. This is more than about 4300 kJ a day at the very minimum!
Yes, Jani’s body needs about eight hundred times more energy than the sun can give him. So let us relax the restrictions one by one. Maybe he can sunbathe naked optimally pointed to the sun all day. So make his cross-sectional area 0.5m² and the under-sun time 10 hours. That still gets us only to 250kJ in a day. Another factor of 10 efficiency improvement will still not give us the energy he needs! And we are not even getting into all the other nutrients the body needs on a regular basis.
In short, bullshit.
So what might be happening?
The common-sense answer: they are eating and drinking when others are not looking. The other famous solar diet practitioner Hira Ratan Manek was caught dining at a restaurant by a documentary crew.
Narendra Nayak also recounts the story of a girl from decades ago:
The girl was admitted to the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences at Bangalore and kept under close observation. For a fortnight she was observed and she was not eating anything! She was drinking water only. There was no fall in her weight and it looked like she could live without affecting her health without consuming any food! Her mother was staying with her and bringing a container of food. When queried she said that it was her food and her daughter was not eating anything and she was under close observation. Those were the days when there were no CC TV cameras and only humans could keep watch! She was under observation 24 hours of the day. The doctors were amazed. There was no apparent explanation and for that! But, it was observed later that the girls mother would hide food beind the ventilator in the toilet! The ‘fasting’ girl would go to the toilet and eat really fast. She had not gotten caught as no one expects someone to eat in the toilet of all places!
There are multiple facts hinting that “studies” of Jani have not been thorough and probably missed (or deliberately ignored!) such possibilities
- The studies have not been submitted to any peer-reviewed journals
- Jani gargled and bathed during the study. Not hard to sneak some water in!
- Urine was found to form in his bladder. Though it is claimed that he did not urinate
- Jani was allowed to move out of CCTV camera view, leave the room for sunbathing and receive devotees. Easy for someone to have sneaked in food
- Rationalist Sanal Edamaruku claims to have been denied permission to check the test setup
- The person conducting the studies was also the one studying Hira Manek in the past, and look how that one turned out
- News items talk about multiple “further investigations” including those from international researchers, but none of that has materialised.
Let us stop here. No point wasting any more of my time or yours on this. Until there is a research-standard peer-reviewed publication showing him stay alive for a month under stringent test conditions, let us not give him any more publicity and invite ridicule on our entire scientific establishment.