On the Gandhi Jayanti weekend, the road to Kainchi Dham in Uttarakhand became a study in the paradox of modern pilgrimage. The shrine associated with Neem Karoli Baba, a place sought out for prayer, reflection and spiritual solace, was swamped by people and vehicles. Traffic stretched for kilometres along the Bhowali-Kainchi Dham route and the Nainital-Almora highway. Some visitors abandoned their vehicles and walked the rest of the way to the temple. Kainchi Dham was not alone. With 2 October falling on a Friday, the three-day weekend sent a surge of tourists and pilgrims into the hills of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, and the jams followed them. Rishikesh clogged. The road to Badrinath Dham and Hemkund Sahib saw severe tailbacks, and vehicle queues on the Joshimath-Badrinath stretch were reported to run to seven or nine kilometres. On the highway to Kedarnath, a drive between Rudraprayag and Srinagar that normally takes about 45 minutes stretched into three or four hours. Parking at Sitapur, Sonprayag and Rampur filled to capacity, and vehicles spilled onto narrow highway shoulders, stalling traffic further. At Kedarnath itself, 12,844 pilgrims reached the shrine on 2 October alone, taking the year's total past 16 lakh. Devotees waited for hours in lines that reportedly stretched two to three kilometres from the approach paths to the temple gates. It is tempting to believe that a film would cause overcrowding. Hanuman Ansh, inspired by the life and miracles associated with Neem Karoli Baba, has brought a fresh wave of attention to Kainchi Dham. Its director, Dr Vishal Chaturvedi, appealed to people to check the situation before travelling after he heard of the unmanageable crowds. But the film is only one of the reasons, perhaps. Overcrowding at religious places has become a post-Covid phenomenon, and Kainchi Dham shows its scale. In the first six months of 2026, around 24.34 lakh people visited, according to the district administration. In an entire year in the past, the shrine drew around eight lakh. Numbers alone do not explain why people climb into the mountains in such multitudes. Belief does. Neem Karoli Baba's modern reputation rests on stories of miracles and on tales linking him to figures such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. For many visitors, the implied promise is that a single darshan could change a career, mend a family, lift an illness or simply quieten a restless mind. The place is no longer only a shrine. It is a bet that something extraordinary might happen if one just turns up. There is a second pull, and it has little to do with faith alone. For people, the hills promise cooler air, quiet and space, and a shrine on a mountain promises all of that with a blessing attached. The trip becomes an escape and a cure in one: leave behind the traffic, the deadlines and the screens, and come back lighter. Peace, stillness and a break from the noise are what many say they are looking for. The irony is that millions have the same idea at the same time. Those fleeing the gridlock of the city drive into another, on a mountain road with no room to turn. They carry the city with them: the cars, the plastic, the impatience and the phones held up to film the very calm they came to find. A drive that should take 45 minutes takes four hours, and the quiet they wanted is a queue three kilometres long. That bet is now placed collectively, and it is shaped by what people see on their Social Media feed on phones. Algorithms push the same few places to millions of screens at once, and the pull is the same for each viewer: there has to be a magic that worked for them, it might work for me. Celebrity visits add another layer. Cricketer Virat Kohli and his wife, actor Anushka Sharma, visited Kainchi Dham in 2022, that put focus on it that year. They've also been regulars at Premanand Maharaj's ashram in Vrindavan. At the Mahakaleshwar Temple in Ujjain, the visitors have included Akshay Kumar, Yami Gautam, Parineeti Chopra, Tamannaah Bhatia, Sara Ali Khan and cricketer KL Rahul, and many more. Other big temples such as Kashi Vishwanath in Varanasi have also had celebrity visitors, and their images have travelled quickly across social media. Each visit inspires their followers and makes them think that this place matters, and you should be there too. The spiritual journeys of influential figures feed a fear of missing out, as they call it FOMO in modern lingo. The Ministry of Tourism does not keep a separate national count of pilgrims, but its domestic tourist-visit figures include trips made for pilgrimage. Those visits rose from 677.63 million in 2021, a year still shaped by the pandemic, to 1.73 billion in 2022, 2.51 billion in 2023 and 2.95 billion in 2024. The pressure is sharpest in places never designed for such volumes. In Uttarakhand, the Char Dham circuit of Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath has put the fragile Himalayan ecosystem under growing strain. Kedarnath alone generated 50.3 metr