The Origin Story

Habits are hard to break and good habits should never ideally be broken. It was therefore painful to find ourselves in the middle of global Covid-19 lockdown unable to practice the good habit of visiting local temples. Rightly so, too. Temple is a place where my family found a lot of solace and hope and the ritual gave life structure and a deep sense of community. Covid-19 however being a severe and some unknown virus turned into a pandemic by March this year and gave our good habit a pause. In the first few weeks, we were cautious and resorted to introspection, but steadily the longing for visiting our temple was growing.

A few weeks later, during the unlock period, when we were able to finally breeze past the temple and it was very satisfying. It prodded me to think of hundreds of millions of fellow devotees who must be sharing our plight of being deprived of darshans.

Covid-19 helped me realize that I am inherently seeking problems to solve and innocuously, while using a food delivery app, I had my A-HA moment. Wouldn’t it be a joy if there was an app that allowed me to search and discover all the temples I am devoted to, and perhaps give me a glimpse of the lord’s darshan? Perhaps also donate money and help reach pujaris or buy religious puja samagri? I could use this app to navigate all temples instantaneously.

It was not long before I researched what was already existing and was saddened by the fragmented solutions in the market. First came TV Channels, and there are many, but they broadcast what they want to show and not the ones I wanted to see, when I want. We live in an era of on-demand content, and TV broadcast while easy, needs an upgrade. There are more than a few YouTube channels and Facebook pages on which darshans are shown and some are quite nice too, but they were somewhat of a pain to find. A few apps that exist in the app stores were not user friendly at all and I didnt find the temple I was looking for. There are some temple websites too, but they were again hard to find and I could not find which ones were authentic. When it came to donations, it was mind bogglingly difficult. I am in the habit of doing weekly donations, but forget recurring scheduled donations, even one off donations required me to navigate the internet banking of Indian banks. I am very internet savvy and if I found the whole experience so difficult, i shudder to think how normal people would ever be able to achieve this task.

All these problems gave my mind a big canvas to paint on. I started penning my initial thoughts together which were very rough but evolved rapidly. I imagined a real physical landscape with real stakeholders at any temple and thought how they could all be strung together with a digital nervous system. We are truly living in a world of technological marvel and this pandemic has catapulted us to a digital future sooner than we could have imagined. It is thus expedient that we used our technological and networking capabilities in fulfilling the spiritual and devotional aspects of life. After MedTech, HealthTech, EdTech, MarTech and FinTech, it is time to coin FaithTech.

Godly, is a foray into FaithTech. It is a Devotee Engagement Platform that is essentially an app (for Smart Phones, Smart TVs and Tablets) that aggregates mandirs and shows live darshans, makes it trivial to schedule donations (or just one time). Pujaris within and merchants around the temple could be easily discovered and enabled within the marketplace within the app. We would also enable devotees to browse photos and videos and peruse history of the temple. Because engagement is key to having a rewarding experience, the app would allow devotees to earn karma points for activities within the app like viewing aartis consecutively and referring others to join them in darshans and transacting on the market. Karma points would give devotees status that would unlock discounts and other privileges within the temple in due course.

There are 980 million believers in the country and even if I am able to help a fraction of my fellow devotees with a divine digital connection, I would find my fledgling team’s efforts redeemed. The idea isn’t limited to just one faith, but we are embarking with small steps in one sphere for now. This is just the start of a long journey of learning and service. I wish we are able to build something of consequence.

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