His Beginning Years:- on January 5, 1893, a baby boy was born to a Bengali couple in Gorakhpur, a city in the north of India. Mukunda Lal was the name they gave him. His family name was Ghosh. He was the second of four sons & the fourth of eight children. From early childhood his mother knew his life’s destiny was to live for & to serve God. He once told me that she saw him one day talking with a few little girls. “Mukunda,” she called to him, “come away from there. That is not you.” He understood, & came away. His Teenage Years:- Mukunda’s father held a high position with the Bengal-Nagpur Railway Company. Owing to that position, he could give his son free posses even to distant cities. Mukunda sometimes took advantage of this offer, traveling with a small group of friends. Dr. Nagendra Dsa, a boyhood friend of his, told me, “Wherever we stopped, groups of boys would gather around Mukunda in a very short time, drawn by his magnetism.” Indeed, Mukunda’s—and later, of course, Yogananda’s—power to win friends wherever he went was extraordinary. Mukunda used to meditate in the attic room of the family home, at 4 Gurpar Road in Calcutta. The male cook teased him one day that he would tell Mukunda’s older brother, Ananta, on him. Mukunda replied quite seriously, “Don’t tease me about a thing like that. If I wish, I can discipline you.”