Lokmat News Network
Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar: Navratri is a festival of faith and devotion, celebrated with joy. Temples are bustling with devotees, yatras, and the craze of dandiya during this time. Long queues form for the Goddess’ darshan. However, when the moment of darshan arrives, hands are reaching for mobile phones before they fold for prayer. Devotees are eager to capture the Goddess’ image, or even take a selfie with her.
Instead of bowing at the Goddess’ feet after darshan, there’s a rush to capture her form in cameras. Some are busy taking selfies, while others are recording short videos for Instagram reels. On Monday morning, at the Karnpura Devi temple, police were advising devotees to focus on darshan instead of photoshoots.
Box: Social media devotion
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp statuses are flooded with photos, videos, and selfies of the Goddess. Captions like “Visited the Goddess today” or “Moments of darshan captured” are trending. The festival of devotion has, in many ways, turned into a festival of earning ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ on social media.
Box: The Impact of Over-Socializing
We live in the age of social media, where everyone rushes to give moment-to-moment updates. But this ‘over-socializing’ comes with a downside. In the obsession with clicking photos, are devotees forgetting to even fold their hands before the deity? This has gone so far that priests have had to remind devotees over the microphone to “fold your hands for prayer.”
Photo Caption: Devotees taking selfies with the Goddess