The Guru Steve Jobs Never Met, But Still Changed His Life — And Zuckerberg's

Neem Karoli Baba Steve Jobs story: Steve Jobs went to meet Neem Karoli Baba in 1974 and arrived too late. What he found at Kainchi Dham shaped Apple, and later sent Mark Zuckerberg there too.

North Desk Correspondent

Chandigarh, September 6

Hanuman Ansh, the sleeper hit that has turned Rs 10 lakh into nearly Rs 100 crore on the strength of its miracle scenes, tells the story of Neem Karoli Baba, the Uttar Pradesh-born ascetic devotees know as an incarnation of Hanuman. What the film doesn’t dwell on — because it isn’t really the film’s story to tell — is the improbable second life this guru’s legend took on in Silicon Valley, decades after his death, through two of the most consequential men in tech.

READ ALSO: Hanuman Ansh Miracles: 5 Scenes Behind the ₹100 Crore Sleeper Hit

Neem Karoli Baba Steve Jobs story: A 19-year-old’s letter

Neem Karoli Baba Steve Jobs story: In February 1974, a 19-year-old Steve Jobs wrote a letter to his childhood friend Tim Brown. He signed off with a single word: “Shanti.” The letter — which surfaced decades later and sold at auction for roughly $500,000 — laid out his plan to travel to India for the Kumbh Mela and, alongside it, to seek out Neem Karoli Baba at his ashram in the Uttarakhand hills.

ALSO: Kainchi Dham Explained: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get There

Jobs made the trip with his friend Daniel Kottke, who would go on to become Apple’s first employee. When they reached Kainchi Dham, they learned Neem Karoli Baba had died the previous September — Jobs had arrived just months too late to meet the man he’d crossed the world for.

Neem Karoli Baba Steve Jobs story: He stayed anyway. Jobs spent seven months in India, immersing himself in the ashram’s teachings and the wider search that had brought him there. He returned to California, by his own account, “unrecognisable” — head shaved, wrapped in Indian cotton robes, his skin darkened from the sun. He had gone looking for a guru and come back, as he put it himself, transformed.

Jobs was never a straightforward devotee — he later made a pointed, somewhat backhanded remark that Thomas Edison had done more for the world than “Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba put together.” But those who have studied his career point to that trip as the seed of something that stayed with him permanently: an instinct for stripping things down to their essence, an emphasis on intuition over analysis, and a discipline around simplicity that would later define the way Apple designed its products.

READ ALSO: The Harvard Professor Fired Over LSD Who Introduced America to Neem Karoli Baba

The phone call that sent Zuckerberg to the same hillside

Neem Karoli Baba Steve Jobs story: The story could have ended there — an eccentric footnote in a tech founder’s youth — except Jobs passed it forward.

In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg visited Kainchi Dham himself and later spoke publicly about why. In the earliest days of Facebook, when the company was struggling and its future genuinely uncertain, Jobs advised him to make the trip to the ashram — to sit with the same hills and the same silence, and reconnect with why he’d started the company in the first place.

ALSO: Kainchi Dham Explained: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get There

Zuckerberg went. He has since credited that visit, and the perspective it gave him, with helping steady Facebook through one of its shakiest periods.

A guru who keeps finding new believers

The Jobs-to-Zuckerberg thread is the one with global recognition, but it isn’t the only name to have made the pilgrimage. Cricketer Virat Kohli and actor Anushka Sharma have visited Kainchi Dham as well, part of a steady stream of well-known visitors that has kept the ashram’s profile alive well beyond its original devotee base.

What is interesting is the contrast at its centre: a barely-known ascetic from rural Uttar Pradesh, who died in 1973 without ever leaving India, ended up shaping the inner life of two men who built two of the most valuable companies on earth. Hanuman Ansh has now introduced his miracle stories to a new audience of millions. The Jobs-Zuckerberg connection is the reason those miracle stories didn’t stay confined to Kumaon.

READ ALSO: The Harvard Professor Fired Over LSD Who Introduced America to Neem Karoli Baba

READ ALSO: Hanuman Ansh Miracles: 5 Scenes Behind the ₹100 Crore Sleeper Hit

ALSO: Kainchi Dham Explained: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get There

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