As Vandana Poddar performs the Hindu puja ceremony daily at her home shrine in Mumbai, she’s guided on her spiritual journey by the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse scripture.
She even attends a weekly class dissecting the deeper meaning of the ancient religious text, with her teacher providing examples to illustrate a particular passage.
“Interpretation is the backbone of this text,” Poddar, 52, told CBC News. “Superficial knowledge can be misleading.”
But many in India are foregoing that in-person contact with a guru interpreting the Bhagavad Gita and turning to online chatbots, which imitate the voice of the Hindu god Krishna and give answers to probing questions about the meaning of
