Vasu J

The most powerful companies on Earth were shaped, in part, by a small man wrapped in a blanket in a Himalayan village. Steve Jobs went looking for him. Mark Zuckerberg was sent by Jobs to find him. He was already dead before either of them ever heard his name properly. His name is Neem Karoli Baba. He was born Lakshman Narayan Sharma, in a village called Akbarpur in Uttar Pradesh, around 1900. Little is recorded of his early life beyond what devotees have passed down. He left home as a teenager to live as a wandering ascetic, then returned to a settled life for a time, before taking up that path again. Devotees say the name he became known by came from an incident on a train. He was travelling without a ticket near a village called Neeb Karori, and was made to get off. According to the story, the train would not move again until he was allowed back on board. He eventually settled in the Kumaon hills of what is now Uttarakhand, and in 1962 built an ashram on the bank of the Kosi river, at a place called Kainchi Dham. He lived simply, sitting on a raised cot wrapped in a blanket, and taught almost nothing in the way of formal philosophy. Devotees describe his teaching as 2 words. Love, and service. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a handful of young Americans found their way to him. Among them was Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist who later became known as Ram Dass and wrote a book about the experience that reached readers across the world. He died in Vrindavan on 11th September 1973. The next year, a 19 year old college dropout named Steve Jobs travelled to India specifically hoping to meet him. He arrived at the ashram to find it nearly empty. Neem Karoli Baba had been dead for months. Jobs never met him. He stayed in India anyway, and the trip is described in his authorised biography as shaping the simplicity and intuition that would later define his approach to building products. Decades after that, Jobs told a younger entrepreneur to make the same journey. Mark Zuckerberg has said that when Facebook was going through a difficult period, before the News Feed existed, Jobs advised him to visit Kainchi Dham. Zuckerberg went, planned to stay a day, and stayed 2. He has said the visit helped him think more clearly about what he was actually building. Julia Roberts has said a photograph of him was part of what drew her toward Hinduism. Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox, was a devotee and later brought Larry Page and Jeffrey Skoll on the same pilgrimage. Whether the events attributed to him were miracles is not something an outsider can verify, and devotees themselves describe them as beyond ordinary explanation. What can be verified is smaller, and in its own way just as strange. A man who owned almost nothing, who left no written philosophy behind, is still quietly present in the founding stories of some of the companies that now shape how billions of people communicate.