History of Maharajji's Global Site

The original site was published in very simple form on a geocities.com site by Jai Ram in 1997. Printouts of the site pages were carried to Mataji in India by Sadhu Ma in early 1998. Mataji sent a message back saying that for Jai Ram to do this site work for Maharajji, he must "come to the source." That is exactly what happened.

Jai Ram and Radha Rani returned to India from August 1998 to May 1999. Jai Ram took about 5,000 photographs. They visited the ashrams and places associated with Maharajji most often accompanied by Sadhu Ma (in 1998). Throughout their travels, Jai Ram and Radha gathered materials from innumerable sources including Gurudat Sharmaji, Usha Bahadur, and Dr. (Mrs.) Saroj Pandey. Jai Ram printed all the pages of the Web site files in Delhi in Winter 1999. The pages were given to Mataji for correction and approval at Holi time in Vrindavan.

After Jai Ram and Radha returned to America with Gurudat Sharmaji, to begin his three month USA yatra, in May 1999, the final pre-launch work was done on the site. The materials at neemkarolibaba.com (now maharajji.love) were first published on the Web in July, 1999.

Version 1: neemkarolibaba.com in early 2000 (source: archive.org)

Materials have been continually added to Maharajji's Global Web site since 1999 - including video and audio of Maharajji, many more photographs, additional stories and books. Many people also came, in America, and brought materials or stories that were incorporated into the Web site.

Jai Ram returned to India alone in 2001 and made a digital video movie of the pranapratishta (inauguration) of the temple at Maharajji's birthplace, Akbarpur, as well as visiting Didiji in Allahabad. He also visited at Maharajji's camp at the Maha Kumba Mela. Materials from this yatra were posted on the site, including video of Jivan singing bhajan in Vrindavan.

Jai Ram and Radha returned again to India in 2003, with their grandson Ashutosh, visiting Kainchi, Rishikesh, Vrindavan and Akbarpur. After that yatra, a major upgrade was done on Maharajji's Global Web site through early 2004.

A new Static Version 2 of neemkarolibaba.com was posted at Hanuman Jayanti time, 2004. This included switching from the old "frames" based site, new left-side navigation menu, individual galleries opening in new window for slide show, and quite a bit of smoothing & polishing. At this time Dasaratha donated a very large album of photographs of Maharajji to be scanned for inclusion.

Version 2: neemkarolibaba.com in August 2004 (source: archive.org)

Version 3 of neemkarolibaba.com was the first dynamic version of Maharajji's Global Web using Joomla 1.0 technology. It was launched in March 2006.

Version 3: neemkarolibaba.com in November 2006. (source: archive.org)

Throughout this time, Jai Ram continued to expand and increase the content of the site. It was Radha Rani who paid the bills for the site hosting.

Version 4 of neemkarolibaba.com was an upgrade that took several years to achieve. Radha Rani became ill with cancer in 2007. Jai Ram and Radha moved from Taos to India for her treatments. Unfortunately, Radha Rani died on January 1, 2009.

Version 4: neemkarolibaba.com in September 2009 (source: archive.org)

During the time of Radha's treatments, neemkarolibaba.com was continually beseiged by attacks from malecious hackers, which Jai Ram and the server wallahs defended against successfully many times. Finally, by around October 09, the hackers even managed to take the site down completely for about 6-8 months.

Beginning of maharajji.com

Clearly something had to be done to save Baba's site. So, in early 2010, Jai Ram, and a team of sub-contractors in India upgraded Maharajji's Global site to Joomla 1.5 and published it at the new URL, maharajji.com. Much of the content was copied and pasted into the new version.

Screenshot of the bottom of the front page of maharajji.com (source: archive.org)

In October 2011, Jai Ram and sevak Urvashi began a project of moving all of the remaining content in version 4 into version 5.

Version 5: maharajji.com in February 2011 (source: archive.org)

The current version of Maharajji's Global Web site, is maharajji.com Version 5. The upgrade was begun in January 2012 with the help of seva from Nitan Khatri. All content was transmigrated to Joomla 2.5, and a new template and logo were used. All extensions were upgraded. The whole purpose of these upgrades is to maintain the highest security, have fast easy access to the content, and for the viewer to present an easier, faster, better interface with Maharajji.

In June 2013, a gallery of 1312 photographs of Maharajji was launched. Extensive curation of this database of photos was done for many weeks prior to launch in an effort to include only the source file or best possible version of each photograph.

Version 6 of maharajji.com was inaugurated in June 2015 with a full site "mini-migration" upgrade of the CMS technology from Joomla 2.5.28 to Joomla 3.4.1.

Version 6: maharajji.com in September 2016 (source: archive.com)

Change to maharajji.love

In December 2017, Jai Ram merged with Maharajji. A year later, in December 2018, the hosting service expired and maharajji.com went offline.

In July 2019, the site was brought back online by Maharajji's devotees from California and India. The pages were put back together from the Web Archive. The 1300+ photos and audio recordings were recovered from devotees' personal archives.

Access to the old domain (maharajji.com) was lost, so all content was placed on maharajji.love.

The visible parts of the site have been polished up, however, the back-end functionality is very limited due to the fact that the site was recovered from the archive instead of being built and programmed properly.

Version 7: maharajji.love in October 2020

In July 2020, the Ashram pages received a makeover and Ashram Brindavon was added to the list. Currently Urvashi is recording the missing songs for the Practice section.

Maharajji's Global Site continues to be updated, polished, corrected, formatted, adjusted, and added to, here and there, bit by bit... by Maharajji's Grace.