Facebook, Apple, Neem Karoli Baba, and the devotion of a 'power couple'
- 3 days ago
- 11 min read
Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Virat Kohli, Anushka Sharma, plus miscellaneous VIPs: What’s common between them? Kainchi Dham in a narrow Himalayan road, huge traffic jams, and an ecological disaster waiting to happen?
By Shamya Dasgupta in Bengaluru
Cricket is a religion in India, they say, and Indian cricketers are gods. The best of them, like Virat Kohli, certainly are, to millions.
And, like cricket creates gods, top cricketers, it appears, can create godmen.
That's utterly facetious, of course, and borderline blasphemous in today's India.
But get in a car, drive up to Ranikhet or thereabouts from Kathgodam, and the sudden, almost overnight, expansion of the Kainchi Dham you will experience is bound to surprise, or shock, you.
Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma might not have created Kainchi Dham, but their visits to it have made headlines and, locals say, led to a boom in pilgrims visiting it. Not always happily for those that live there, and we are not only talking about humans.
It was early November 2025 when we made the journey. The people we would stay with had said more than once, "Hope you don't get stuck in Kainchi." Why would we, we wondered.
Sure, traffic has worsened everywhere in the country, but how bad could it get on the hilly road up from Kathgodam? And it's early winter already, surely not peak tourist season?
After a point, the car we were in slowed down, and then ground to a halt. It must have been around 11am. "If you had come yesterday, it would have been fine," the driver said, not sounding too perturbed, like someone who knew what to expect, but there was an edge to his voice.
"Why is there a jam here," we asked him.
"Kainchi Dham aaye hai sab, aaj Shanivaar hai na." (Everyone has come to the Kainchi Dham because it's a Saturday.")
Narrow mountain road. And the part where Kainchi Dham stands is particularly tricky. The road is shaped like a V. Sharper than a hairpin bend. Like slightly open blades of a pair of scissors. Which gives the stretch, and thus the Dham, their names.
On this narrow road, when vehicles are parked to one side and traffic is heading in both directions, well, you don't move much. The stretch of roughly a kilometre took us over an hour to get through.
The gentleman driving our car assured us we were very lucky. I'll keep his name out of this, but this is his take:
"This used to primarily be a place of pilgrimage for people from the area, the villages around here. Some of us used to drive across, and many people, depending on how far away they live, would walk," he said in Hindi. "But now... most people from the villages have stopped coming. It's become a VIP Dham. When there are major festivals, thousands of people come from the plains. They come by train to Kathgodam and take taxis to come here. Some people fly to Pantnagar and then take taxis. The traffic has become awful. Especially on weekends, it's almost impossible to drive here, and our business suffers. What used to take us three hours now takes us four hours, sometimes even longer.
"A former president of the country, many members of Parliament... they have all come in the last month itself. They all come with ten-fifteen cars, not one. When they come, more people come to see them."
He also informed us that a new bypass was being constructed to allow VIPs easier access to the Dham. "Because VIPs need it, it's being built very fast."
The bypass on Almora National Highway is meant to be eighteen kilometres long and include tunnels as well as a motor bridge.
"The bypass is being built to provide an alternative approach to the Kainchi Dham area, where visitor traffic increases during peak travel months," a Hindustan Times report dated January 27, 2026 says. "Officials said the new alignment is expected to reduce bottlenecks on existing routes and offer a smoother passage for commuters as well as travellers headed towards hill districts."
The Kohli effect?
Only to an extent. But it's quite severe, isn't it?
The background first, if "Kainchi Dham" and therefore "Neem Karoli Baba" are new to you.
The ashram was established in 1964 by the Baba, born Lakshman Narayan Sharma in 1900, on land donated by a local resident. Neem Karoli Baba is a hugely revered saint, and June 15 is the big day, the consecration day of the Dham, when thousands of devotees visit the Ashram.
Neem Karoli Baba died in 1973. No successor was named and there is no specific supreme guru there anymore, but a trust runs the place, and various gurus, from what we gathered, play the key roles.
Though associated with Bengaluru, where she grew up, Anoushka Sharma, whom Kohli is married to, is originally from Uttar Pradesh. She was born in Ayodhya in 1988. And her family has a long association with Neem Karoli Baba and Kainchi Dham. Kohli first visited the Dham in November 2022, took part in the prayers, and pictures of him and his entourage went viral.
That would have been that, but it wasn't.
Cut to June 12, 2025, and Pushkar Singh Dhami, the chief minister of Uttarakhand, where Kainchi is, swung into action, chairing a high-level committee meeting to put in place a "multi-tiered response to the sharp rise in footfall" at the Dham, as The Times of India put it.
Vandana Singh, the district magistrate of Nainital, was quoted in the same report as saying that, while around eight lakh devotees used to visit the Dham through the year earlier, "2024 saw a massive surge with 24 lakh pilgrims". For June 15 that year, "more than 800 police personnel and three PAC companies" were deployed in the area to control the crowd and prevent untoward incidents. On a narrow mountain road.
On January 2, 2026, The Times of India published some more interesting details about Kainchi while discussing the "persistent traffic congestion" on the road. Quoting a study conducted by the tourism department, the newspaper said, "infrastructure and civil amenities emerged as key areas of concern". Respondents the study spoke to complained about parking facilities (74%), sanitation (58%), cleanliness and hygiene (24%), and refreshments (19%).
The locals, who have started to keep their distance from a shrine they earlier felt belonged to them, are disgusted, even though it means more business for at least some of them. A shopkeeper we spoke to acknowledged that "business goes up for the week of the mela, two-three days before June 15, when people start coming here, and two-three days after, while people are still around, looking around the mountains".
So, spiritual tourism plus tourism-tourism, which does sound appealing.
Kohli and Sharma aren't the only big-ticket celebrities endorsing Kainchi Dham. Manoj Bajpayee, the actor, has spoken about his "magical" experience in 2025 when he visited the Dham and meditated there in a cave while at a low point in his career.
All of that has contributed to the spurt in tourism. Who wouldn’t want to travel up to the beautiful Kumaon region of the Himalayas, at roughly 1400 metres, and seek guidance from someone that national icons swear by... And not just them.
Steve Jobs had visited a long time ago, shortly after Neem Karoli Baba's death in 1973, and the experience had changed him, he is supposed to have said. Jobs founded Apple in 1976, soon after his visit. He later asked Mark Zuckerberg to do the same, in 2008.
“When I had questions about what I should do with the company [Facebook], I went to see Steve Jobs, and he told me that I should visit this temple in India… I went, and it was really meaningful," Zuckerberg has gone on record saying. Bill Gates may or may not have visited too.
If something works for Kohli and Jobs and Zuckerberg and Gates, heck, it'll work for me.
What it isn't working for is the fragile ecological balance of the Himalayas, not to mention the people from the area, who feel "outsiders have taken over," as a local businessman put it.
"The problem is that, as you may have seen, the road itself is very narrow. The Dham is located in a narrow valley. There is no place to park and whoever's done the publicity has brought lakhs and lakhs of people. They come in hordes. Meaning that there is much less traffic during the winter and much more in the warmer months," Dr Ravi Chopra, director of People's Science Institute and former chairman of the high-powered committee of the Char Dham Pariyojna formed on the direction of the Supreme Court of India, says over the phone from Dehradun, where he is based.
"Now, with all these cars coming in droves for a longish period, for two or three months it's a total mess. And immediately after October, there are a lot of people who leave towns like Delhi and Chandigarh to get out of the noise of Diwali, and head to these places. So the traffic volume is very high, which also creates a pollution problem. And I don't think there are any measurements as yet of the levels of pollution that are created there."
Pointing fingers specifically at the Kainchi Dham for spoiling the neighbourhood, so to say, and adding to the pressure on the Himalayas might be unfair. It is hardly the only pilgrimage site in the region. If anything, places like Kedarnath-Badrinath, Amarnath, Mount Kailash and many others have long existed as massive attractions. They are much bigger than Kainchi Dham and attract a higher number of devotees each year.
The impact is obvious: pressure on limited water resources; deforestation to accommodate tourists and their needs; air and noise pollution, which don't help with the flora and fauna in the mountains; and waste, which, apart from being massive in volume, also takes longer to decompose because of the higher altitude.
All of which, it doesn't need to be said, makes the situation that much more dangerous.
Even outside of these specific issues, climate change feels very, very real when you’re up in the mountains—you can’t help but see the smaller ice caps that the peaks wear today. You can’t help but ask, what will we do when they are gone?
"The larger problem lies with the Char Dham programme. It has ballooned in the last few years. And ecologically, it is a disaster," Chopra says. "
In the current decade, because the big push came with the widening of the roads: the roads to Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri, Jamunotri, that was the big push. It was done without adequate geological investigation. It was done in a hurry. Initially, the official figures were that 55,000 trees were cut down along the route. These are official figures that only give you the number of trees that have a certain girth. There may be many more younger trees or saplings that are also cut in the process.
"And during the actual construction, there have been numerous, literally hundreds, of landslides. And when you have a landslide, you lose more trees. The loss of green cover in that area is massive. And that will continue to have a long-term impact,” said Chopra.
"There are areas there that are extremely prone to movement of the plates below the crust of the earth. So landslides are not uncommon. In Kund, where you cross the Mandakini River, this forest has held and kept the slopes stable. They had started cutting that forest to build a road. I think they may have accepted the recommendation of our committee not to build a road over there, because they would destroy the forest…
"A survey—by conservationist Anoop Nautiyal—was published in 2023. That said more than one slide or slide zone per kilometre had been noted on the road between Rishikesh and Badrinath. Part of that road comes in the main boundary fault and part of it comes in the main central fault, which are extremely sensitive areas in both these regions."
Data gathered by Nautiyal and Chopra suggest the Char Dham Yatra would not have attracted even a million people per year twenty years ago. In 2025, it was over five million, in a rough estimate, with a large percentage in some months of the year.
And that's not nearly all.
"In 2019-20, we did a very preliminary estimate of how much carbon dioxide was being generated in the last 20 or 30 kilometres [up to Badrinath]," Chopra says. "From the bottom of Joshimath to Badrinath—I think it's about 30 or 35 kilometres—the road goes within a very narrow valley. On both sides, the slopes are very steep and high. In such an area, the greenhouse gases are going to go up. And the glaciers are not that far. Even on the way to Badrinath, if I'm not mistaken, there are five hanging glaciers. It was one of the hanging glaciers that had the avalanche in Dharali last year. Deposits of particulate matter, that is released by the exhaust, adds a deposition on the glacier and blackens the surface. It's worsened by the huge amount of traffic that is now being taken to places like Kedarnath by helicopter."
Water springs are affected. Explosives are still used for making tunnels in the mountains. Debris is generated where roads are constructed—millions of tonnes, Chopra says—and this is all thrown in the rivers.
The riverbed rises. Flooding happens. Pilgrims and tourists can stay away in the rainy season. Locals can't.
And what about the fauna?
Deforestation alone causes more and more animals to wander into human settlements. That means deaths. Primarily of the animals in question, but also of humans.
This article is not about apportioning blame, necessarily. It's about expressing anguish, more than anything else. Pilgrims will pilgrim; pilgrimages will pilgrimage. And more of them will come up.
Ways have to be found to deal with the damage caused by religious and spiritual as well as other forms of tourism and what goes by the name of 'development'.
"Ek parking ka jagah bhi bana rahe hain sarkar, woh dekhiye," the driver had told us, pointing to an unfinished multi-storey construction almost abutting the Dham's structure. A gentleman in Ranikhet later confirmed that a helipad would also come up on the terrace of the parking building for VIPs. "Uttarakhand’s first rooftop helipad set for Kainchi Dham; estimated cost Rs 40 crore," a headline from February 7, 2025, which I looked up after the trip, confirmed.
There’s a telling tweet from Nautiyal in June 2025: "As a concerned resident of #Uttarakhand, I feel both saddened and ashamed to see the state’s reputation in tatters due to its worsening traffic situation. Whether it’s Mussoorie, Nainital, (Jim) Corbett [National Park], Rishikesh, or Kainchi Dham, the story of complete chaos is the same in all the places.
Said Chopra: "While the powers that be may believe they can manage the fallout through cliched press releases and a pliant media, public anguish on social media cannot be silenced. I am aware and notice regularly that ordinary citizens in thousands are both angry and helpless in the face of this unending mess…
"What’s worse is the complete silence with not a single official voice trying to explain the government’s position or reassure the public. Perhaps those in charge assume people will eventually forget these experiences. But that’s not always how memory or public sentiment works and the damage on the public perception front can often be nasty."
When we visited, this is exactly what we witnessed: the "worsening traffic situation", "public anguish", "ordinary citizens in thousands are both angry and helpless". Nautiyal's tweet is from after the helipad had been planned but before the bypass started coming up.
This essay started on a lightish note, talking about the sudden popularity of Kainchi Dham because Kohli and Sharma have brought the place to national consciousness, but that is really not what this is about.
There's a crisis.
The great Himalayas are dying.
Or, being murdered.
And it would seem religion—and what comes with it—is a contributing factor, a major one.
At a micro level, it also tells us what one power couple's devotion to a spiritual leader could lead to in India. It can change the lives of thousands—humans, animals, trees, glaciers—for the worse.
While, of course, changing things for the better for those that have found salvation in whatever form. They key is planning. That’s not in the hands of the celebrities or the pilgrims.
When we were there, in November, the Nanda Devi and Trishul and other peaks should have glistened in the morning sun because of the snow on them. But their faces were more black than white instead. Was it the deposits Chopra talked about?
And an eighteen-kilometre highway is hardly ideal for the delicate ecology. But it won't be the first of its kind, and it won’t be the last either, however much angry locals and angrier conservations shout themselves hoarse.
Photos: Barring 4 and 5, all photos by Shamya Dasguupta
Shamya Dasgupta is a sports journalist by profession, currently working as a deputy editor with ESPNcricinfo, and a cinema enthusiast. He’s the author of “Don’t Disturb the Dead: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers” (2017), and two books on sports, “Bhiwani Junction: The Untold Story of Boxing in India” (2012) and “Cricket Changed My Life: Stories of Hope and Despair from the IPL and Elsewhere” (2014). He has also translated Mahasweta Devi’s “Laayl-e Aasmaner Aayna” into the English (as “Mirror of the Darkest Night”, 2019) and recently edited an anthology of essays on Ritwik Ghatak by eminent writers, filmmakers, academics, novelists, and poets, among others: “Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments,” published by Westland Books. He lives in Bengaluru.