Preaching through the media

Last month, a senior Vatican official said that Catholic bloggers are an extraordinary reality in the life of the church. As if acknowledging the power and reach of the new social media, the Pope, the head of the Catholic Church, last week to send his first tweet, announcing the inauguration of a news portal.

Like their counterparts in the West, India’s globe-trotting spiritual gurus have embraced social media to reach their disciples. Followers of spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in 78 countries can watch and listen to their leader’s satsangs through webcasts. The organisation uses Skype, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter to help devotees interact regularly with their guru. Other groups have been using the Internet and SMS services to send out community news and information on prayer services and yoga sessions. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar explains the inseparability of technology and spirituality when he says: Technology has made the world into a global village, spirituality has made it into a family.

The success of the social media has made it hard to resist even for those who call these new tools of communication shallow and impersonal. Father Joseph Dias, a Jesuit priest based in Mumbai has strong views on issues like the secularisation of Christmas and the dilution of religion in daily life, but he agreed that social media is an efficient and fast way to reach a large number of people. “Though I doubt whether Pope Benedict himself uses much of the new media, he has encouraged priests to make use of it to communicate their values and the gospel,” said father Dias who is himself a late convert to e-mail.

Like the tele-evangelists who speak to a vast audience, religious and spiritual groups understand the new media’s immense reach. Around three years ago, the Indian Christian Activists Network (ICAN) started a daily SMS service from Mumbai. Apart from community news, the SMS also features a short prayer. It started with 20,000 subscribers; ICAN said that it now has around 1,00,000 subscribers.

The wide reach of the media is just one of its advantages; convenience is another. Husayn Kopty, a 20-year old Dawoodi Bohra who is studying management, said that he relied on websites to get information on religious and social events. Like Kopty, the Dawoodi Bohra diaspora spread across the world can access news, photographs and discourses given by their leader, the Syedna, on two news portals, one of which can be used only by community members holding a special electronic card. “They (websites) are useful. I say that because it keeps you updated with all the events, and if one cannot or does not attend those functions, it can be viewed on website. There is this box where one can see what’s happening tomorrow,” said Kopty.

While social media can be a source of information for some people, others use to unite far-flung communities. Joseph Dias of ICAN said their SMS services brought Christians from, for instance, Delhi and Mumbai, on a common platform. “It has several uses,” he said about the SMS service. “We use at as a prayer point, but it also helps advocacy. It aids communication in an emergency and can be used to force the authorities to act in situations where a community is under attack,” said Dias.

Freyan Bhathena, editor of the new Parsi newspaper, Parsi Times, said that their small community dispersed across the world relied on social media to stay together. Earlier this week, when their apex community trust, the Bombay Parsi Punchayet held elections to choose a trustee, these new channels of communication were put to maximum use. “When counting of votes were going on, it was surprising to see many community members in Australia and United States following the timeline of events,” said Bhathena.

Some groups have used new media to promote their social projects. “We leverage technology to reach out to people who cannot be reached through classical means,” said a spokesperson for Art of Living. “We also engage in community-building by connecting like-minded people. For example, in the Meri Dilli, Meri Yamuna campaign, which was a huge river clean-up drive, volunteers effectively used social media to collaborate with other other.” There are other benefits too, least of which is the financial windfall that comes with a bigger audience. Around five years, Mumbai’s Siddhivinayak temple, under the management of a dynamic chief executive officer Sanjay Bhagwat, started offering online puja bookings. “Devotees could book the Tuesday puja for an entire year online,” said former trustee Uday Pratap Singh. In the next three years, the temple’s revenue increased four-fold to Rs 24 crores, no doubt helped by new devotees in cyberspace.

The new media is also useful in creating an alternate communication channel when others means are inaccessible. Advocate Arcanjo Sodder started a blog ‘Laitytude’ in May 2010 to anchor alternate views on issues affected the Catholic church in Mumbai. He said  that the church’s official weekly magazine would not publish letters that criticised priests. “We were forced to start the blog,” said Sodder. Sodder’s blog which carries local news and reports from international sources has 300 daily visitors. “It has been so successful that a few parishes have called me to help them set up such a forum,” says Sodder.

The advantages of the new media has almost made it immensely useful. But is it indispensable? “Youngsters spend too much time online looking for information when their grandparents, for instance, could give better answers to their questions. We rely too much on technology. If someone wants to the recipe for a Parsi dish, they search the Internet when their grandmother could teach them a better way to cook it,” said Bhathena. Father Dias added his caveat. “We should not worship the media. The media is a means and it only has relative value; we can do without it.”