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The long-haired, dreamy-eyed guru whose pictures were found strewn in the De family's home at 3 Robinson Street was revered by Steve Jobs and Elvis Presley, among many celebrities, and appears on the cover of a landmark Beatles album.
Jobs, the co-founder of Apple who died four years ago, was fascinated by the life of Mukunda Lal Ghosh, born in Gorakhpur in 1893 and raised in Calcutta, where his family lived on Garpar Road.
Most Bengalis would be familiar with Garpar Road as the birthplace of Satyajit Ray and the residence of Jatayu, the detective fiction writer in his Feluda series. But in the US and many other countries, Mukunda Lal alias Paramahansa Yogananda, the proponent of Kriya Yoga, could rival Ray for the title of most famous resident of this north Calcutta neighbourhood.
So fascinated was Jobs by Yogananda that he read his Autobiography of a Yogi - he had first encountered the book as a teenager and revisited it when he came to India in 1974 seeking spiritual enlightenment - once every year, according to Walter Isaacson's biography of the tech visionary.
In October 2011, each guest at the memorial service in Stanford for Jobs was given a small brown box containing the book. Jobs had himself chosen the book as a gift for the guests at his funeral.
"I knew that this was a decision he made, and whatever it was, it was the last thing he wanted us all to think about.... It ( Autobiography of a Yogi) was a spiritual book that inspired Jobs throughout his life," CEO of cloud computing giant Salesforce.com, Marc Benioff, who was among the who's who of business, politics and entertainment at Jobs's memorial, would say later.
At 3 Robinson Street, Yogananda's influence was apparently just as deep. Framed and unframed pictures of the guru were found strewn across the De family's home, where two of its members - patriarch Arabindo and daughter Debjani - were found dead last week.
Debjani had presumably been dead for around six months, her skeleton covered in a blanket on a bed beside which her younger sibling Partho, 44, had slept all this while.
Partho and Debjani - both engineers who graduated from Rajabazar Science College, not far from Mukunda Lal's Garpar home - were apparently as fervent as Jobs in their pursuit of spiritualism through Yogananda's philosophy. The siblings had kept an Amar Chitra Katha comic book on the life of the guru and a picture of him even in the dashboard of their car.
A monk at the Dakshineswar headquarters of the Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, set up by Yogananda, told Metro that Debjani had enrolled for a four-year membership and bought his autobiography in 1997. Three years later, she took younger sibling Partho to the Satsanga headquarters and made him a companionate member.
The last official record about Debjani in possession of the Satsanga is a letter she had written in 2001, seeking permission to attend the guru's birth anniversary in Ranchi. She attended the event alone from January 3 to 5, 2002.
The syncretism in Yogananda's philosophy - Jesus had appeared in the dreams of Mahavatar Babaji, the first in the line of spiritual order that Yogananda was a part of - aligned with the siblings' belief in aspects of both Hinduism and Christianity.
Partho has spoken to doctors and the police about "a personal faith" that combines elements of Christianity with Hinduism. At Pavlov mental hospital, he has often been heard crying out to Jesus.
Jobs had been influenced by Buddhism but didn't find that an impediment in following Yogananda's teachings.
Long before Jobs became familiar with Yogananda's teachings, Elvis had joined the guru's Self-Realisation Fellowship in LA in 1965 and remained a follower.
The Beatles's association with the guru became known in 1967 when the band released its album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. On the album's cover, amid images of actors, writers and the Fab Four themselves, are pictures of Yogananda and his line of gurus - Swami Yukteswar, Lahiri Mahasaya and Babaji.
It later emerged that when George Harrison came to India in 1966 to take sitar lessons from Pt. Ravi Shankar, he had gifted him a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi.
Ravi Shankar too was a regular visitor to Yogananda's ashrams.