Who is Baba Neem Karoli who inspired Virat-Anushka, Steve Jobs, Julia Roberts and Mark Zuckerberg?

Cricketer Virat Kohli and actress Anushka Sharma visited an ashram in Vrindavan along with their daughter. The video of their visit was recently posted online. On January 4, they visited Baba Neem Karoli Ashram in Vrindavan. The couple stayed there for about an hour and had ‘darshan’ of Baba’s ‘samadhi’ and also meditated in a ‘kutia’ (hut).

Radhekrishna Pathak, trustee of Neem Karoli Baba Ashram, said they were expecting the couple in the afternoon but the two reached there early morning, PTI reported. He also said that Sharma’s family are followers of Baba Neem Karoli. Apart from them, Steve Jobs, Julia Roberts and Mark Zuckerberg are other well-known people who have visited his ashram and are followers.

Who is Baba Neem Karoli?

Neem Karoli Baba was a Hindu guru and a devotee of the god Hanuman.

His followers called him Maharaj-ji.

His real name was Lakshman Narayan Sharma and he was born around 1900 in the village of Akbarpur in the Firozabad district of Uttar Pradesh to a wealthy Brahmin family.

He was married by his parents at the age of 11. However, he left home to become a wandering sadhu. At his father’s request, he returned home to lead a regular married life. He fathered two sons and a daughter.

Outside India, he is known as the spiritual master of many Americans who traveled to India in the 1960s and 70s.

He encouraged service to others as the best expression of total devotion to God and practiced Bhakti Yoga throughout his life.

He would say that attachment and ego are the greatest obstacles on the path to God-realization and that “a scholar and a fool are equal as long as attachment and ego are present in the physical body.”

In 1974, Steve Jobs traveled to India with his friend Dan Kottke to study Hinduism and Indian spirituality. They also planned to meet Neem Karoli Baba, but he had already died.

Influenced by Steve Jobs, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg also visited Baba Neem Karoli’s ashram in Kainchi in 2015 when the company was going through difficult times.

Hollywood actress Julia Roberts is also said to have been influenced by Baba and to have been attracted to Hinduism through him. In an interview, she was asked where her interest in Hinduism came from. She said, “It came when I saw a picture of a guru named Neem Karoli Baba and I was so attracted to the image of this person. I didn’t know who he was or what he was up to, but I felt a very strong interest.”

Baba died in the early hours of September 11, 1973, in a hospital in Vrindavan, India, after falling into a diabetic coma.

His ardent followers Ram Dass and Larry Brilliant also founded the Seva Foundation in Berkeley, California, which was also funded by Steve Jobs. His ashrams are located in many cities in India and the USA.