Looking for Neem Karoli Baba: How a 20th century guru found a new generation

Neem Karoli Baba, a 20th-century Indian spiritual guru, gained worldwide renown during the Western spiritual counterculture movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Born in 1900 as Lakshman Narayan Sharma into a wealthy Brahmin family in Uttar Pradesh's Firozabad district, he wandered extensively across Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh before settling in Neeb Karori village in Farrukhabad district.

It was here that he began creating places of worship and eventually built his first temple, Hanuman Garhi, on the Manora hillside in Nainital. Over the next two decades, he expanded his influence by establishing temples and ashrams in various locations, including Bhumiyadhar, Kainchi, Kakrighat in Uttarakhand, Vrindavan, Kanpur, Lucknow, Shimla, and Delhi in India.

Kainchi Dham became the principal ashram of his later years and is now visited by thousands of devotees each day, with an unprecedented surge in attention starting around 2015, following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to the Facebook headquarters where Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the impact of a "difficult period" in his life, inspiring him to visit Kainchi Dham.