Guru Cool

Spirituality goes trendy as its practitioners take to social media to reach out to angstridden Gen Z. But do they succeed in teaching them anything deeper than the latest mumbo-jumbo?

- Sonali Acharjee

They call her the Meerabai of Gen Z. Twenty-seven-year-old Jaya Kishori from Kolkata turns Krishna folktales into 30-second clips to address issues of loneliness, friendship and lack of selfconfidence. This has helped ‘Jaya didi’, as she is known, gain over 1.9 million followers on Facebook and another two million on YouTube. Her namesake, Jaya Pandey, a 16-year-old in Delhi, swears by her. “I have to keep shifting schools because my par-ents are in the army,” says Pandey. “But wherever I go, Jaya didi is with me. I would be lost in the maze of change without her as my guide.”

There is also Devi Ushma Kishoriji from Jhansi. Infinitely wise for a 14-year-old, she gets regular leave from school to post new content for her 10,000 followers on Instagram. Most of her posts are about finding peace amidst the bewildering experiences of life.