{"id":11834,"date":"2006-10-10T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-10T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2006\/10\/10\/hindus-outside-india-turn-to-the-web-for-festival-prayers\/"},"modified":"2006-10-10T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-10T12:00:00","slug":"hindus-outside-india-turn-to-the-web-for-festival-prayers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2006\/10\/10\/hindus-outside-india-turn-to-the-web-for-festival-prayers\/","title":{"rendered":"Hindus Outside India Turn to the Web for Festival Prayers"},"content":{"rendered":"

www.cnn.com<\/a><\/p>\n

NEW DELHI, INDIA, October 4, 2006: October 20 marks the beginning of the three-day Hindu festival of light, Deepavali, and some of the millions of Indians living in countries like Britain, the United States and Canada are joining in the celebrations back home electronically. For prices ranging from $8 to $15, religious portals are offering prayer sessions for IT-savvy devotees at temples in India, sending them a DVD of the prayer and offerings like dried flowers or vermilion, blessed by the priest. “(The number) of people registering online for puja (prayer) during this festival season has surged almost three to four times from the normal days,” said Mervyn Jose of Saranam, an India-based site. Around 60 percent of Saranam’s clients are living overseas, the majority of whom are Indian IT professionals in their thirties, who are too busy or too distant to get to a temple. <\/p>\n

But despite most major temples and religious organizations having their own Web sites, some are not happy with the modern version of worshipping God. “Though priests perform pujas for our clients they are not all happy doing it, even the temple authorities and trusts are not very encouraging,” says Jose, who offers clients a list of about 150 temples across India to do their prayer sessions. However, some priests are sympathetic to the new breed of devotees. “Time is changing and so are devotees, they don’t have so much time and they live very far,” said Gopal Pujari, a priest at the revered Vaishno Devi shrine in India’s northern state of Jammu and Kashmir. “But they have devotion in heart and despite all the constraints, they still remember God in any which way they can.” To go to the Saranam website click here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

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www.cnn.com NEW DELHI, INDIA, October 4, 2006: October 20 marks the beginning of the three-day Hindu festival of light, Deepavali,,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}