Hanuman Ansh: The saint linked to Apple, Google, Facebook and eBay

'Hanuman Ansh', Vishal Chaturvedi's film on Neem Karoli Baba, has become one of 2026's biggest box-office surprises. The film opened on August 7 with just Rs 10 lakh but, powered by word of mouth, has crossed Rs 50 crore in India.

The film has prompted renewed interest in the Indian saint whose followers include some remarkable names from the American technology world. Steve Jobs travelled to India looking for Baba, Mark Zuckerberg later went to his ashram on Jobs' advice, while Google's Larry Page and eBay co-founder Jeffrey Skoll have also been reported to have visited Kainchi Dham. The story, however, begins well before Silicon Valley, with an American psychologist named Richard Alpert who returned from India as Ram Dass and helped introduce Maharaj-ji, as Neem Karoli Baba was called by his devotees, to millions of Americans.

How Ram Dass took Neem Karoli Baba to America


The American story of Neem Karoli Baba begins with Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist who had worked with Timothy Leary on psychedelic research. Alpert travelled to India in 1967 and met the saint his followers called Maharaj-ji. The encounter changed the direction of his life and Baba gave Alpert the name Ram Dass.

Ram Dass' own account is revealing because he later played down the amount of time he had actually spent in his guru's physical presence. He said he had been in a temple connected with Maharaj-ji from November 1967 to March 1968 but estimated that he saw the guru for only about four hours altogether. Yet he regarded Maharaj-ji as central to the work that followed.

That work became the book 'Be Here Now', published in 1971. The unusual blue book combined autobiography, spiritual instruction, drawings and practical guidance on meditation and yoga. It became a counterculture classic and introduced Hindu spirituality to a huge American readership. The Love Serve Remember Foundation, which preserves the teachings of Ram Dass and Neem Karoli Baba, describes it as a book that brought meditation, yoga and Eastern spirituality to millions of Western readers.

This is the part of the story that often gets lost when the Baba connection is reduced to a list of technology billionaires. Before Jobs ever travelled to India, an American spiritual subculture had already formed around Maharaj-ji. Ram Dass was its most important populariser. Through him, stories of a little-known Indian saint in the Kumaon hills reached young Americans searching for alternatives to conventional religion and culture. Steve Jobs was among those who encountered that world.

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Apple: Steve Jobs went looking for Baba

Jobs travelled to India in 1974 with Daniel Kottke, his friend from Reed College who would later become one of Apple's earliest employees. Jobs was 19, had dropped out of college and was searching for a spiritual direction. According to Walter Isaacson's biography, he had been encouraged to seek out Neem Karoli Baba after hearing about him through people in the American spiritual milieu.

Kainchi was therefore not an accidental stop on a tourist itinerary. Jobs was trying to find the guru he had heard about. But the meeting never happened.

Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973, several months before Jobs reached India. When Jobs arrived at the ashram, he discovered that the man he had travelled across the world to meet was already dead. Jobs spent much of his time afterwards travelling through nearby villages. He also became ill with dysentery.

The experience also stripped away some of the romantic expectations Jobs had brought with him. India was considerably poorer and harsher than the idealised country imagined by many Western spiritual seekers. His seven-month stay involved illness, simple living and prolonged exposure to rural India rather than the kind of mystical encounter he had anticipated.

It was only later that Jobs considered the India trip deeply important. Years afterwards, he told Isaacson that returning to America produced a greater cultural shock than travelling to India. What stayed with him was his impression that people in Indian villages relied more heavily on intuition and experiential knowledge than on the analytical habits he associated with the West.

That observation became part of Jobs' own explanation of how he worked. He believed intuition could lead to insights that conventional analytical reasoning might miss.

There was another enduring consequence of the India journey. While recovering from dysentery in the Nainital region, Jobs came across an English copy of Paramahansa Yogananda's 'Autobiography of a Yogi'. A previous traveller had apparently left the book where Jobs was staying. He read it repeatedly. The book stayed with him for the rest of his life. Isaacson records that in 2011, months before Jobs died, 'Autobiography of a Yogi' was the only book on his iPad. Jobs had first read it as a teenager and then reread it during his India trip.

Larry Brilliant, who became a lifelong friend of Jobs, was another link between the two worlds.

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Google: Larry Brilliant carried the message into Silicon Valley

If Steve Jobs is the most famous technology figure connected with Neem Karoli Baba, Larry Brilliant is arguably the most consequential bridge between the saint and Silicon Valley.

Brilliant was an American physician who came to India as a young man and became a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba. He lived at Kainchi for about three years. His relationship with Maharaj-ji was much more direct than Jobs'. He was not simply a visitor passing through the ashram. And Baba appears to have had a very specific idea about what Brilliant should do with his life.

Baba pushed Brilliant to leave the ashram and work with the UN on the smallpox epidemic. Brilliant initially resisted but Baba repeatedly encouraged him, predicting that he will become a "UNO doctor". Eventually, Brilliant left and joined the World Health Organization's campaign to eradicate smallpox. He became one of the key figures in that historic public-health effort.

That sequence gives the Baba story an important dimension that is missing from most technology coverage. Baba's influence on Brilliant was not simply about personal spirituality. Brilliant understood his guru as directing him towards a concrete humanitarian mission of helping eradicate one of humanity's deadliest diseases.

Decades later, Brilliant entered the technology world. He became the founding executive director of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm.

By then, the relationship between Baba and Silicon Valley had acquired another layer. Brilliant knew Steve Jobs personally from their years as young spiritual seekers. He also became part of the network through which other technology figures encountered Kainchi. Google's Larry Page had visited the ashram and so did Jeffrey Skoll, the eBay co-founder.

Brilliant's role is particularly revealing because his life crossed three very different worlds -- the spiritual community around Neem Karoli Baba, the international public-health establishment and Silicon Valley philanthropy. He did not leave Kainchi to become a technology executive. He left because his guru had directed him towards service. The technology career came much later.

Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg followed Jobs to Kainchi

Mark Zuckerberg's connection to Neem Karoli Baba is unusually well documented because Zuckerberg himself described it publicly. In 2008, Facebook was facing a difficult period. Zuckerberg later said that he sought advice from Steve Jobs. Jobs told him to visit a temple in India that had been important during his own early development.

Zuckerberg followed the advice and travelled to India and visited Kainchi Dham. In 2015, during an event at Facebook's headquarters with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Zuckerberg explained why he had made the trip. He said Jobs had advised him to visit the temple in order to reconnect with the mission he believed Facebook was pursuing. Zuckerberg spent almost a month travelling in India. He said the experience of seeing how people lived and connected reinforced his belief in the importance of Facebook's mission.

Larry Brilliant had called a Kainchi ashram manager, saying that someone named Mark would be coming. The manager did not initially know who Zuckerberg was. As per an ET report, Zuckerberg arrived from Pantnagar with almost nothing. He had only a book and was wearing trousers torn at one knee. He was expected to stay for one day but bad weather disrupted flights, forcing him to remain for a second day.

That detail gives a sense of how far removed the physical Kainchi experience was from the world Zuckerberg occupied. Facebook was already becoming a global technology company but its founder arrived at a small ashram in the hills with little more than what he was carrying.

Zuckerberg's visit also created a curious reversal in the Jobs story. Jobs had gone to Kainchi as a young seeker because he wanted to meet Maharaj-ji, only to discover that the saint had died. More than three decades later, Zuckerberg went because Jobs believed that returning to the same place could help a technology founder rediscover his sense of purpose.

Kainchi thus became part of a chain of personal advice running from one generation of Silicon Valley to another.

eBay: Jeffrey Skoll and the network around Kainchi

Jeffrey Skoll's connection to Neem Karoli Baba is less publicly documented than those of Jobs and Zuckerberg, but it is important because it shows that the Kainchi network extended beyond Apple and Facebook.

Skoll was eBay's first president and co-founder. He later became a major philanthropist and established the Skoll Foundation and Skoll Global Threats Fund.

Skoll too was connected to Larry Brilliant, who served as an adviser to the Skoll Global Threats Fund. This shows Brilliant was not an outsider who merely happened to know Baba. He had lived at Kainchi for years and remained part of the American network surrounding Maharaj-ji.

Skoll's story therefore belongs to the same wider pattern as Page's. Neither is as well documented in his own words as Zuckerberg's visit. There is little public material in which Skoll explains what Maharaj-ji meant to him personally. But the reported visit matters because it demonstrates that the attraction of Kainchi reached people whose careers were being shaped by the emerging Internet economy.

The ashram was not drawing technology executives because Baba had offered some theory of innovation. What drew these people was the reputation of a spiritual teacher whose American followers had connected his message with a life of service and inner searching.

For Skoll, that theme would later become central to his own philanthropic work, although it would be too strong to claim that his philanthropic career was caused by Neem Karoli Baba without more direct evidence.

A saint with no Silicon Valley business philosophy

The technology connection to Neem Karoli Baba should not be overstated. Baba did not formulate a philosophy of entrepreneurship. He did not speak about computers, startups or markets. His teachings, as remembered by his Western devotees, were strikingly simple. He told his devotees to chant 'Sita Ram' and Hanuman Chalisa. In Kainchi, Rameshwar Dass, an American devotee who had lived with Baba, told ET several years ago that the saint did not deliver elaborate sermons or systematic lessons to foreigners. He spoke about service and devotion. He also spoke about Christ and told his followers that Christ and Hanuman were the same, as per the ET report.

Ram Dass turned Baba's life into a spiritual movement in the US. Brilliant interpreted it through public service and eventually helped eradicate smallpox. Jobs absorbed elements of the experience into his lifelong interest in intuition and Eastern spirituality. Zuckerberg later treated Kainchi as a place where he could reconsider Facebook's purpose. Page and Skoll also made the pilgrimage. The common thread was not a business lesson but the question of what a person should do with his life. What began at Kainchi Dham eventually became part of the personal histories of people who helped build the digital economy.