Something strange has been happening to Neem Karoli Baba, a man who was born and passed away long before the age of the internet and social media. By every account, he also cared nothing for fame while he was alive. He has nonetheless become one of the most reproduced faces on the internet, so much so that his image seems ubiquitous on social media platforms, smiling back at you from Instagram stories, promising miracles, prosperity, work, marriage, or a cure, as long as you repost his picture, tag your ten friends, and type a religious slogan in the comments.

This makes me uncomfortable, not because I question the legitimacy of Baba’s grace, but because I have been trying to understand, for more than a decade, what such grace asks of its believers. I believe it was never this simple. It isn’t a question of sharing a photo of a saint. They may have been photographed countless times, and devotees may always held on to their images of him. This is where devotion turns into a bargain: Do this, and the baba/mata in question will give you that.

Something is definitely changing in the way people discuss saints/holy persons online. What was once a personal matter, someone’s private sense that their guru/seer had answered a prayer, becomes a universal bargain: Share this, and the same thing will happen to you. The language used is typical of clickbait all across the internet. Except that this time, the bait comes adorned with the face of a saint. That is the attention economy at work. The platform does not ask whether something is true or sacred; it rewards what makes people pause and click. Platforms reward engagement through views,........

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