"It is technology which is enabling us to reach the Gods at the click of a mouse." —Mervyn Jose, an employee of Saranam.com, a website based in India which charges a fee for performing prayers, blessings, and offerings at Hindu temples on behalf of clients. Saranam effectively offers religious outsourcing, and it’s services are apparently most popular with a tech-savvy demographic of the diaspora: according to The Washington Post, approximately 60 percent of the company’s clients live abroad and are Indians in their thirties who work in the technology industry.
The site sometimes looks like a Best Buy, with advertisements for services that read: “Saranam is offering a new subscription service called Club Saranam that gives you an incredible 15 pujas per month for just $15.00. This price is inclusive of shipping to any part of the world.”
Not everybody is skeptical about phoning it in. Gopal Pujari, a priest at the Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu and Kashmir, in northern India, noted: "Time is changing and so are devotees; they don't have so much time and they live very far… But they have devotion in heart and despite all the constraints, they still remember God in any which way they can."
For some, religion by proxy is infinitely preferable to no religion at all.
The site sometimes looks like a Best Buy, with advertisements for services that read: “Saranam is offering a new subscription service called Club Saranam that gives you an incredible 15 pujas per month for just $15.00. This price is inclusive of shipping to any part of the world.”
Not everybody is skeptical about phoning it in. Gopal Pujari, a priest at the Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu and Kashmir, in northern India, noted: "Time is changing and so are devotees; they don't have so much time and they live very far… But they have devotion in heart and despite all the constraints, they still remember God in any which way they can."
For some, religion by proxy is infinitely preferable to no religion at all.
