In a world where everything from hugs to heartbreaks can be delivered through DMs, it was only a matter of time before salvation itself went digital. Deepak Goyal is an entrepreneur, visionary, and potential co-founder of the next Unicorn (or, as one Twitter user so elegantly put it, Only-corn). For the low, low price of Rs. 1,100, Goyal promises to give your printed photograph a snan (holy dip) in the Triveni Sangam at the Mahakumbh Mela 2025. All you need to do is send him a WhatsApp text.
Naturally, the internet — never one to let a good meme slip away — responded with glorious chaos. Someone’s already started a digital gym, and another noble soul launched a digital peg service where your portrait is lovingly dipped into a glass of whiskey. But the one that hit closest to home — emotionally, spiritually, and gastronomically — was the digital momo service.
Secret time: I’ve never had momos. Yes, yes, gasp, faint, call the UN Human Rights Council if you must. I’m a picky eater. The kind who looks suspiciously at textured food and considers spice a personal attack. So when someone offered to digitally steam my face over a bamboo basket of virtual momos, I paused. Was this finally my path to enlightenment? My pilgrimage into the momo-loving majority, minus the threat of, say, cabbage?
In some twisted, WiFi-enabled way, these digital rituals are just the next logical step in how we live now — forever vicarious and perpetually adjacent to experience. Weddings on Zoom. Birthdays over Reels. And now, salvation via JPEG.
It’s funny until it isn’t. Because increasingly, the digital isn’t just supplementing the physical — it’s replacing it. Photos instead of bodies. Streams instead of presence. Symbols instead of rituals. Whether we’re seeking fitness, fulfilment, or fried dumplings, the virtual stand-in is becoming the real thing. We've gone from sharing online to living online. In the process, the idea of "being somewhere" has shifted from geography to bandwidth.
We live in a moment where the idea of "doing something" has increasingly been replaced by "sending something to be done." Why travel when your face can go? Why exercise when AI can generate a before-and-after? Why risk diarrhoea from street momos when your selfie can steam safely in Photoshop? It’s the economy of experience without the inconvenience of living it.
And let’s be honest, some of us are thriving. My picture has now digitally taken a holy dip, sipped on a virtual peg, and squatted in a fitness app. I’m practically a new person — spiritually cleansed, slightly tipsy, and suspiciously buff. Meanwhile, I haven’t moved from the couch. I haven’t even chewed anything.
Of course, there’s something undeniably absurd here. Goyal’s offer is equal parts business plan, and performance art. A commentary on how faith, like everything else, is up for remote access. But the joke’s also on us — because we’re all buying into it. Whether it’s nostalgia, laziness, or just curiosity, we’re willing to send our faces across the country for a slice of a feeling we no longer have time to earn.
Still, I’ll take it. If technology has made the divine downloadable, then let it also give me a momo I don’t have to eat. Maybe that’s all salvation is now — watching someone dunk your photo into a holy river and thinking, Yup, that counts.
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