ABSTRACT
This chapter examines complex interactions, online participatory practices and meaning-making to understand articulations of online spiritualism, that is, how digital technology and spaces facilitate the convergence of spirituality and new media. It reviews three interrelated dimensions: transformations of Indian media markets, spiritual/religious publics and contemporary spiritualism. As expressions associated with spiritualism, Master and Seeker also embody a certain interconnected market fragment oriented to neo-spiritual and lifestyle-secular cultures. In the 1990s, the newspaper introduced a daily spiritual column in its editorial section, called The Speaking Tree. The Times of India is the only English newspaper among the top ten paid-for circulating newspapers in India, and its news website tops the list based on the number of unique visitors. The multi-spiritual, virtual diversity is itself aspirational for users, given the hybrid blending of broad rhetorics of religion, faith and choice, cosmopolitan self-awakening and plural beliefs.
