About 9 km past Bhowali, the road from Nainital to Almora winds through forest and turns back on itself in two sharp hairpin bends. In local dialect, kainchi – the Hindi word for scissors – is the word for such bends, and the place takes its name from them, according to the Nainital district administration. Beside the bends is Kainchi Dham, a Hanuman temple and the ashram of spiritual guru Neem Karoli Baba, on whose following thousands of devotees visit this relatively quieter stretch of the Kumaon hills.
The shrine, which was drawing crowds even before the film, saw a surge in the number of visitors this month, with the rush linked to Hanuman Ansh, a film directed by Dr Vishal Chaturvedi on the life of Neem Karoli Baba.
As traffic jammed the roads around Bhimtal and Bhowali around the October 2 long weekend, Chaturvedi urged people in an Instagram video to check conditions before travelling, and suggested other places linked to the guru, such as Vrindavan, if Kainchi Dham was too crowded.
The film, made on a small budget, opened quietly on 250 screens on August 7. By September 11, it was running on 2,000 screens and had grossed ₹200 crore in India, news agency PTI reported.
The ‘baba’ and his shrine
Neem Karoli Baba, whose birth name was Lakshman Narayan Sharma, was born around 1900 in a village in Uttar Pradesh's Firozabad district. He married young and later became a wandering ascetic. He was a Hindu spiritual teacher devoted to Hanuman, and his followers called him Maharaj-ji.
{{/usCountry}}Neem Karoli Baba, whose birth name was Lakshman Narayan Sharma, was born around 1900 in a village in Uttar Pradesh's Firozabad district. He married young and later became a wandering ascetic. He was a Hindu spiritual teacher devoted to Hanuman, and his followers called him Maharaj-ji.
{{/usCountry}}He left no body of philosophical writing. Devotees remember his teachings through stories and their own experiences of him. Some regard him as an incarnation of Hanuman, and accounts of miracles attributed to him have come down largely through the testimony of followers.
Neem Karoli Baba became closely linked with the Kainchi Dham ashram in the later years of his life, after the temple there was consecrated in 1964. He died in Vrindavan on September 11, 1973.
Also read: Massive rush, traffic in Manali, Mussoorie, Kainchi Dham as people head to the hills on long weekend
From the Kumaon hills to Silicon Valley
His following abroad began largely with Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist who met Neem Karoli Baba in India in 1967. The guru gave him the name Ram Dass, meaning "servant of God", and Alpert went on to write Be Here Now, his account of Indian spirituality, meditation and yoga.
Steve Jobs, who hadn't founded Apple by then, travelled to India in 1974 hoping to meet the guru, whom a classmate had urged him to seek out, his biographer Walter Isaacson wrote.
On reaching the ashram, Jobs learned that Neem Karoli Baba had died the previous September. Jobs spent his time there walking around nearby villages and reading a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi that an earlier traveller had left behind.
Decades later, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg said in 2015 that, during a difficult early period for the company, Jobs had advised him to take a spiritual trip to India and visit a temple Jobs had once gone to. Zuckerberg did not name it, but reports say he went to Kainchi Dham.
A 2010 Good Morning America interview quotes Hollywood actor Julia Roberts as saying that a photograph of Neem Karoli Baba drew her to Hinduism.
PTI said cricketer Virat Kohli and actor Anushka Sharma are among his devotees.