The gods are back. They just brought a soundboard.

On why young people are turning to chanting, tarot, and crystals — and what it might actually mean.

Last weekend, a friend sent me a photo from a venue I know well - a 500-seat auditorium in south Mumbai where I’d seen jazz nights and indie gigs. Except the stage was bathed in violet light, and in the middle of it all: a harmonium. The crowd was not 50. It was not the demographic you’d picture at a Wednesday satsang. They were, unmistakably, people my age and younger, singing back to a live band performing bhajans.

My first reaction was to reach for irony. My second reaction - slower, more honest — was something like recognition.

“We kept waiting for meaning to arrive on the other side of achievement. It didn’t. So now we’re looking somewhere older.”

Something is shifting, and it’s worth taking seriously rather than packaging it as a trend piece about vibes. The generation that grew up with therapy-speak and anxiety memes and the complete collapse of institutional trust is now reaching for ritual. Not blindly, not uniformly - but noticeably, and in ways that don’t map cleanly onto either the religiosity of their grandparents or the secular self-optimisation of their older siblings.

Let's be precise about what's actually happening. There are kirtan nights selling out ticketed venues. There are tarot readers booked weeks out - not by middle-aged seekers at wellness retreats, but by 22-year-olds navigating career pivots. Crystal pop-ups operate somewhere between a market stall and a confessional. The astrology app opens before the LinkedIn notification. These aren't fringe behaviours anymore. They're becoming a baseline texture of young adult life in Indian cities.

The easy read is that this is aesthetic adoption - spirituality as a content category, ritual as a personality trait. And yes, some of it is that. The rose quartz sits well on a beige shelf. The tarot deck photographs beautifully. I don’t want to be naïve about how much of contemporary spiritual practice exists in the orbit of personal branding.

But that reading is also too convenient. It lets us dismiss something real without sitting with it. When someone says chanting quiets the noise - when hundreds of people close their eyes and sing the same words in the same room and emerge feeling less alone - what exactly are we debunking? The effect is real. The relief is real. The only question worth asking is whether the container matters.

Ritual has always been technology. It just went out of fashion for a while.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: we are the first generation to grow up fully inside the attention economy, and also the first to be consciously trying to escape it. We understand, in our bodies if not always in our words, that fragmentation is the condition of digital life. The algorithm is designed to keep us in a permanent state of almost - almost satisfied, almost informed, almost connected. Ritual is the opposite of almost. Ritual says: you are here, now, fully. That is the experience people are paying for, singing for, making pilgrimages to concert halls for.

What’s interesting about the Indian iteration specifically is how it bypasses the Western wellness detour entirely. There’s no need to discover Vedic philosophy via a podcast hosted by someone in California. The practices were always there - in grandmothers’ kitchens, in temple courtyards, in the kind of devotional music that felt embarrassing to admit you liked at 19. What’s changed is the shame. The new generation has dropped it, or at least loosened it, and found that underneath was something that actually worked.