ven before India went into lockdown on March 25, 2020, the country began closing its temples. Although organized religion can offer comfort during a crisis, mass gatherings are jet fuel for a plague. Festivals, pilgrimages, and community worship are all based on precisely the kind of socializing that must be stopped to bring Covid-19 under control. Fortunately for quarantined Hindus, an app already existed for accessing the gods. To every disaster its winners, and though VR Devotee was launched by its parent firm Kalpnik back in 2016, the app’s services are ideally suited to these strange times.
Last February, VR Devotee had been downloaded 800,000 times, with an average of around 15,000 users a week, and it was making money through a subscription service.
