Seekers of their own truths

For many young Indians, exploring their paths in life means choosing their own routes to spirituality

- Arman Khan

In the autumn of 2019, when a friend of Ariana Minwalla presented her with a deck of tarot cards, something in her soul was soothed.

"My most cherished teenage memory is of sitting by my grandmother's side as she pensively contemplated the tarot spread in front of her," says 22-year-old Ariana. “There was just so much colour and energy in them.”

For Ariana, the tarot deck gathered together the various strands of her sense of spirituality and religious identity that had frayed due to a lifestyle that had not been of her own choosing.

"I'm a Parsi and I grew up in an Army colony which is a wholly different experience from being raised in a Parsi colony," explains Ariana. "It was difficult to enjoy our own festivals because there was just no one around to celebrate them with us."

These childhood experiences formed the basis of Ariana's desire to have a personal language with which to make sense of the chaos around. And this led to her own idea of true spirituality, which she both discovered and nurtured on her own. This world of spirituality comprises vivid tarot cards, angel healing, oracles and the promise of hope.

"I started reading tarot cards on my own in college," she says. "Oracles are just channelised messages from the beyond-your ancestors, the moon. The cards will only tell you what they want to tell you. I'd like to call this soul therapy because it goes very deep. Certainly, in my case, it does."

Crystal clear

Youth is the age of exploration and discovery. It's also when most of us are at our most idealistic, strongly believing that the various societal systems set up by the generations before us must be dusted off, examined closely and perhaps set aside if they don't work in our new world.