Online pujas | God on speed dial

At 29, Kavya Sethi, a banking professional from Gurugram, has begun consulting an AI pandit before major decisions, including a job change and planned PPF withdrawal. When a difficult planetary phase was flagged in her kundli—a Vedic birth chart calculated from a person’s date, time and place of birth—she chose a prayer tailored to it. “There is already so much anxiety around work and money,” she says. “If I know a difficult period may be coming, I would rather prepare for it. It makes me feel I have done something instead of just waiting.”

That instinct—to prepare ritually for uncertainty rather than turning to faith only after something goes wrong—is becoming more visible among younger urban Indians. As jobs feel less secure, healthcare more expensive and parenting more competitive, many are turning to worship for a sense of control. Doctors have expressed concern around the rising rate of C-section deliveries, partly due to ‘muhurat caesareans’ — elective procedures timed to astrologically favourable birth charts. Online platforms offer karmic consultations for job exits, baby names, entrepreneurial success and breakups. Kundlis, graha dashas (unfavourable planetary combinations) and muhurats (ideal periods for new ventures) are, of course, centuries old. What feels contemporary is the level of individual tailoring around them.

This trend sits within a wider anxiety about getting life decisions right. Earlier generations did not have to deal with social comparison as it’s experienced today, what with a perennially digital existence that’s inextricable from physical interactions with your friends and colleagues. The usual anxieties are given new life every time you reach for your phone and log on to social media: somebody else has been promoted, bought a house, moved abroad, found a partner or built a seemingly more successful life. “Young people today are being asked to make very high-stakes decisions in an environment where very little feels guaranteed,” says Dr Upasana Chaddha of Mindscape Counselling Centre, Delhi.

Private line to heaven

Vivek Shukla, founder of PujaPurohit, a prayer booking platform, says around 40 per cent of all prayers on the website are now personalised to one’s needs and wants, and more than half the users are under 35. The average cost of this service is Rs 1,000, inclusive of the equipment required for the prayer, with a negotiable dakshina given to the priest. The demand has pushed the platform to simplify the first layer of astrological interpretation. “We built a personalised AI astrologer, which helps users understand their birth chart and which puja may suit them, in simple language,” says Shukla. “Instead of waiting for an appointment with an astrologer, users can enter their birth details and receive an instant interpretation of their kundli, planetary placements and possible recommendations.”

For Ananya Sen, 27, a homemaker in Noida, this service became particularly useful when she and her husband were trying to decide on an auspicious date to move into their new home. After the AI consultation, she realised that it could be useful in many other scenarios; she has since returned to it often before family ceremonies and major purchases. “What I like is that I can ask very specific questions and immediately understand why a particular date or ritual is being suggested,” she says.

“Sometimes people call us and are absolutely certain,” says Shukla. “They say, ‘I need this puja. I have already been told this is my problem.’ But our responsibility is still to have the requirement checked by an experienced pandit. A person may be asking for a ritual that is unnecessary or may not be the appropriate one for the situation.”

Interrogating the ritual

That does not necessarily mean younger worshippers are becoming more conventionally religious. For some, the change is almost the reverse: they want rituals explained, justified and customised. Pandit Shyam Pandey, an astrologer and vedic priest in Delhi NCR, says, “Earlier, many younger family members would sit in a puja because the parents had organised it. Now, the younger yajman (devotee) often asks: why this mantra, why this date, why this particular puja for me?”

This scepticism, even as devotees seek divine assurance of security, is reflected in their subconscious willingness to find meaning in astrological readings, regardless of the predictions they make. A 2026 study in the International Journal of Psychology of 484 young adults in India found that simply using religion in a positive way—for comfort, hope or support—did not automatically mean people had less anxiety. But the devotees who interpreted their difficulties as punishment from God, felt abandoned by God or experienced spiritual conflict, tended to have higher anxiety. In other words, faith can help people cope, but it is not a guaranteed shield against distress, and the way belief is used still matters. This becomes important when astrological predictions begin driving major financial, medical or personal decisions.

Personalised pujas prop up this psychological construct by collapsing space and nullifying the need for a family priest in the same neighbourhood. With telephonic consultations, the experience can be strikingly intimate from far away. Aarav Sethi, 31, an IT consultant based in Bengaluru but originally from Delhi, could not travel north when he wanted to offer a Ganga puja in Gangotri, Uttarakhand. Through GangaPuja, an online service, the ritual was arranged there using his name and gotra (paternal ancestry). While in Kerala for a business trip, he watched the priest beside the river through his laptop, saw the water flowing behind him and folded his hands in front of a phone screen as he was asked to state his intention in offering the prayer. Afterwards, the platform sent a video of the proceedings and prasad.

With booking platform Poojat, devotees can search not only by city and language but increasingly by the nature of the problem—career and business, relationships, wealth, health, legal disputes or ancestral duties. With the average service on the website costing around Rs 1,000, founder Gyan Poddar says that the larger market is reactive. “Most younger users are problem-driven rather than preventive when it comes to praying. They consult a priest after experiencing an issue in their career, finances, marriage or personal life. The priest then analyses their kundli and recommends a specific dosha-related prayer or remedy.”

Personalisation can extend even to familiar annual rituals. “Someone may perform the traditional Diwali puja, but instead of automatically doing it at the usual family time in the evening, they choose a specific time during Simha Nakshatra (passage of the moon with respect to the zodiac sign of Leo) because that suits their individual astrological considerations,” says Vijayshree Kalani, founder of Vandanam, a prayer booking platform which charges users an average of Rs 1,000 for availing its services. “So the tradition remains, but it is being personalised around the person’s kundli or graha dasha. This is no longer limited to marriage, childbirth or buying a house. Even relatively small milestones are being planned this way.”

Perhaps that is where the generational shift is most visible. Younger Indians have not invented the kundli, the muhurat or the remedial puja. What they are doing is placing these traditions inside a culture of personalisation and risk management. The prayer may be ancient; the anxiety surrounding it is unmistakably modern.