New Delhi: Nobody wanted to sit next to Abhinav Arora in school. That was three years ago, before the self-proclaimed 10-year-old Krishna bhakt amassed over 13 lakh followers across social media platforms. Now, parents request teachers to seat their children beside him. He was invited to the inauguration ceremony of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari has dubbed him India’s “Youngest Spiritual Orator”. His reels are making headlines in both local and national newspapers.
Arora is India’s newly minted viral religious celebrity, spouting words of wisdom at public events and on social media. At last count, he had 9.5 lakh followers on Instagram, 2.2 lakh followers on Facebook, and 1.3 lakh subscribers on his YouTube channel. Yet, he seems as immune to the adulation as he was to the slights he faced before his rise to fame.
Hindu god Krishna has his heart and soul, he said earnestly.
“Radha-Krishna reside where there is love in the heart. I can sacrifice all worldly comforts to live in a small hut in Vrindavan,” Arora told ThePrint from his West Delhi flat, while his sister and mother closely watched him, speaking on his behalf when they deemed it necessary.
Arora doesn’t have friends—he doesn’t want any. He doesn’t care for toys or smartphones. Television is a distraction. His only desire is to commune with Krishna and Radha. He narrates and quotes from religious texts. He wears dhotis and kurtas. He likes to visit Krishna’s birthplace Vrindavan, read the Bhagavad Gita, and tend to the idols in the family’s massive puja room.
“I consider myself very fortunate that Shri Radha Rani made me her bhakt. She found me worthy of spreading the message of religion. She held my hand from the beginning,” said Arora, whose video of a tearful farewell to a Ganesha idol went viral.
He isn’t even a teenager yet, but Arora has already become a polarising figure. His legion of followers call him ‘bal sant’ or child saint.
His detractors mock him as a carefully crafted construct designed to appeal to the religious. “Bro cracked the algorithm of India,” wrote one user on X. Comments like “Beta (child), have you done your homework?” and “He didn’t go to school today either” frequently appear under his social media posts. While clips of his pilgrimages to Vrindavan have as many as 30,000 likes, the priests at Krishna’s birthplace claim they’ve never heard him preach.
“What does this child know? How can this 10-year-old understand the Bhagavad Gita, its grammar, and its principles? Where has he studied from? Who is his guru?” said a priest at the Banke Bihari temple in Vrindavan.
Always a Krishna bhakt
Arora’s parents did not want this life for their son. But now, they have embraced it wholeheartedly.
“We were never very religious,” said his mother Jyoti Arora. Before Arora was born, the family was “normally religious”, performing a small morning and evening aarti (worship ceremony). But from the moment he could start walking and talking, he would hold his grandfather’s finger and ask him to take him to the mandir, said his mother.
Parents are supposed to teach their children, but we learn more from our son. While we were trying to change him, he changed us.
—Jyoti Arora, Abhinav Arora’s mother
At the mandir, he would stare at the priests, transfixed by the pujas and rituals. According to Jyoti, he learnt much of what he knows about Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita from listening to the priests at the mandir near their Delhi home.
“From the time he learnt to read, he began reading religious texts,” she claimed.
Sitting next to him in the drawing room, Jyoti recalled her attempts to encourage him to be a “normal child”. She would play the popular cartoon Motu Patlu and pretend to laugh just to get Arora interested. She bought him jeans and T-shirts, urging him to wear them at home, but he never did.
“If foreigners can come to Vrindavan in saris and kurtas, why should we as Hindus and Indians wear anything else?” Arora countered.
His father, Tarun Raj Arora—a business consultant, motivational TEDx speaker, and author—recalled scolding him for not behaving like other children and refusing to play with his cousins. In school, Arora was out of sync with other children.
“When everyone greeted each other with ‘hey dude’ and ‘hey bro’, Abhinav would say ‘Radhe Radhe’. So no one ever wanted to sit with him,” Jyoti said. When she brought it up, he told her it didn’t matter because Krishna sat with him.
Finally, his parents gave in to his devotion.
“Parents are supposed to teach their children, but we learn more from our son. While we were trying to change him, he changed us,” said Jyoti.
The Aroras are fully invested in their son’s spiritual journey. They have stopped watching TV altogether. His sister Mannat, 16, recalled a time when they wanted to watch an interview of his but couldn’t find the remote. The family now only eats sattvik food—a “pure” diet focused on fresh, lightly cooked meals that are easy to digest.
“I love all kinds of sweets, sevaiyaan (vermicelli), and the dal my maiya (mother) makes,” said Arora. For a moment, he drops his serious expression and becomes a child talking about the food cooked by his mother.
Three years ago, everything changed with the arrival of Arora’s cousin from Switzerland. Following his suggestions, Arora’s parents started posting clips of their son reciting kathas and performing darshans on social media.
Today, Arora is everywhere. His Instagram handle has a phone number through which people can get in touch with his father for talks, collaborations, and events. The accounts are professional, the content on point, and current. For Eid, Arora posted a reel with a Muslim boy that was captioned: “Sanatan is the culture that makes Abhinav and Abdul stand together.”
At first, Arora said his social media accounts are handled by his parents. Later in the conversation, he mentioned “his team”; his sister Mannat quickly interjected to say they are “people who join him for his kathas.”
There are reels of Arora reciting shlokas (verses) and bhajans (devotional songs), visiting temples, and performing religious ceremonies, as well as clips from TV interviews and podcasts. His most popular videos, boasting as many as 3 crore views, feature him speaking to his idols, singing, and dancing in the middle of crowded processions and temples.
His fans can’t get enough. “If every child had the knowledge you did, the world would be so beautiful,” one fan commented.
All the adoration I’m receiving is only for Krishna, and so all the positivity and blessings I get, I surrender to him.
—Abhinav Arora
Last year, the government acknowledged and celebrated his religiosity. On 11 December, Gadkari presented Arora with India’s Youngest Spiritual Orator award at the Global Indians Conclave and Awards (GICA). In July 2024, he was presented with the Vatsalya Gram Spiritual Creators Award by Sadhvi Ritambhara, a key figure in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement.
One of the family’s proudest moments was when Arora was invited for the inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya in January. He met Anupam Kher, who gave him a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and invited him to Mumbai, said Tarun. “He was the youngest guest invited,” the father said.
And now, Arora is finally popular in school.
“His teachers ask him to sing bhajans for them during free periods. They often joke in the PTAs that there’s only one Abhinav but 28 other kids who want to sit with him, so they have to use a roster,” said Jyoti.
Arora listens to his mother and sister talk about him quietly. He occasionally interjects, but seems content to let them do the talking—unless it’s about Krishna and Radha.
He’s happy with the love he has been receiving, but it’s not for him to keep, he said.
“It is love for Lord Krishna. All the adoration I’m receiving is only for Krishna, and so all the positivity and blessings I get, I surrender to him.”
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Detractors on social media
Earlier this week, Arora shared a reel where he and other devotees are dressing an idol for a puja. In less than 48 hours, it hit over 10k likes. It got its fair share of “Radhe Radhe” comments, heart emojis, and praises. But the reel also received a fair bit of brickbats.
One commentator criticised the performative nature of the reels. “You ran away from school again?” asked another. A number of detractors make fun of the boy and his demeanour.
“If you or I received the kind of trolling he receives on a regular basis, we would have given up social media by now. He is unaffected,” said Tarun. But Arora’s growing fame has raised concerns for the family regarding his security and safety. His parents claim to have received death threats and are cagey about revealing personal information—such as where Arora studies, their home address, and their travel plans.
On Instagram, his detractors mock him for not going to school, but his parents insist that they take his education seriously. The only thing Arora contributes to the conversation is his love for Hindi as a subject.
Arora wants to study in a gurukul (a residential school that follows the Vedic tradition) when he is older and become a brajvasi (resident of Krishna’s birthplace, Braj). His only demand from his parents is to let him visit Vrindavan and its temples every week. The sacred city in Uttar Pradesh where Krishna grew up and met Radha is barely four hours from Delhi.
But a weekend trip to Vrindavan is only on the cards if he completes his homework, said Jyoti.
“Abhinav loves going to the Banke Bihari temple in Vrindavan. When we’re there, sometimes a 15-minute journey takes an hour because of all the people that stop to meet him,” said Mannat.
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Pushback from Vrindavan
Arora’s eyes light up when he talks about Vrindavan. The Banke Bihari and Nidhivan temples are his favourites. His Vrindavan reels show him attending religious processions and performing ceremonies. He is swarmed by crowds, with people requesting selfies.
However, a priest at the Banke Bihari temple is not impressed by “social media devotion”.
“Let him come and speak to any priest or devotee here in Vrindavan, and we’ll see how much knowledge he has,” said Gopi Goswami. Social media devotion is a growing business in Vrindavan. Every day, there’s a new poster of a new kathavachak (narrator of religious tales).
“Everyone outside just wants to use Vrindavan, especially for social media. It is a place for devotion, not exhibition,” Goswami added. The priest insisted that many children like Abhinav come to Vrindavan to shoot content for social media and gain virality.
Like Goswami, many of the residents and traditional devotees that ThePrint spoke to want to protect the religious sanctity of Vrindavan. They frown upon the display of religious fervour on social media.
“The true essence of Vrindavan lies with the local residents who prefer to keep their distance from the internet,” Goswami said.
Such children [child influencers] can get accustomed to the role they are playing, and it is not fair to them.
—Ashis Nandy, social theorist and psychologist
Abhinav is not the first child to gain social media popularity for his religious and devotional content. He has competition in a five-year-old ‘Bhakt Bhagwat’ from Jaipur, who has over 22 lakh followers on Instagram. He claims to study at a gurukul and posts videos of his learnings there, as well as motivational, spiritual quotes and kathas (religious tales). Like Arora, he is a devotee of Krishna and Radha and his parents manage his accounts. Instagram bans children under 13 from hosting accounts—but parents are allowed to run them.
The rise of child influencers is unfolding across the world, in niches ranging from fashion to spirituality.
“These cases can sometimes lead to tragic things,” said social theorist and psychologist Ashis Nandy. There is always the danger of childhood becoming “a kind of premature adulthood”.
Nandy cited the 1960 film Devi (Goddess), directed by Satyajit Ray: “A young girl’s father-in-law finds her Devi-like. So, she becomes more and more like what he sees, and ultimately she dies, telling her husband, ‘I’m not a goddess.’”
“Such children can get accustomed to the role they are playing, and it is not fair to them” Nandy added.
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Up at 3:30 am
Back at his home in Delhi, Abhinav Arora hops and skips excitedly toward the puja room—another glimpse of the child in him. It is the biggest and most elaborately decorated room in the flat, home to about 30 idols. While the other two bedrooms only have beds, small tables, and fairly empty walls, the puja room is extensively decorated with figures and images of gods.
Guests are given a detailed tour of the room, where he introduces them to Krishna and other idols. This interaction with his gods is an important part of Arora’s routine—and it begins at 3:30 am.
After his morning ablutions, he begins his prayers with the mala-jaap (chanting with prayer beads) followed by tulsi seva parikrama—circumambulating the holy basil plant. He then “wakes up” other idols, bathes them, ornaments them, and offers them bhog (offerings). The entire ritual takes around three hours and emulates the daily processions at the temples in Vrindavan.
After completing these rituals, Arora leaves for school. Upon returning, he sleeps for a few hours, completes his homework, reads holy texts, performs a daily Krishna aarti, and spends time with his idols until he goes to bed around 11 pm.
Jyoti is still amazed by his discipline. The routine never wavers. Even in the cold winter months, Arora is up at 3:30 am.
“I can’t wake up early, so I find it very strange that I’m sleeping under my blankets and my 10-year-old son is doing puja in the cold.”
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)