Article: New Woman, June 2004

Mission EARTH

This is an initiative by the Connect-Ticket group to start a movement to heal Mother Earth considering the tremendous upheavals that we are witnessing off late in the form of cyclones, earthquakes, forest fires and even human-made disasters like terrorist attacks. The belief is that goodness and positive energy needs to prevail to calm things down - and one of the best ways of doing this is through creative visualisation done by as many people across the globe as possible. Creative visualisation is a very powerful exercise and has been proven to give miraculous results!
Here's the proposal:

Every evening at 10 pm as per your time zone, be in a meditative posture and visualise the world as a peaceful place. Cover it in white light, visualise Mother Nature as peaceful and giving, visualise the people respecting nature and in one with it, visualise happy smiling people, visualise abundance. While doing so, make this affirmation - 'The world is peaceful'. Do this for 15 minutes. If you are travelling, just having these images in the mind and intending that these effects take place, is also fine. If you can't spare 15 minutes, spare howmuchever time you can. If you can do this exercise many times throughout the day, that's also good. We will watch the results as they unfold and pray for the best to happen.

Do forward this mail to whoever you feel would want to participate in this movement. Yes, forwards are not the done thing, but this forward is one that most people would not mind sending. After all, it is for our good. Thank you very much. Your comments are most welcome

The Order of the Joined Hands

This article on Connect-Ticket was published in The Times of India in January 2007.

Sharmila Ganesan profiles a quaint community that unleashes a mysterious force on Sunday afternoons after lunch

A fresh mattress is laid out in the living room and idlis are waiting in the cooker. Mrs Chitra Sridhar is ready to welcome her guests. They drop in one by one, about 20 of them in all. Among them is Neha, a pretty girl in a saree, Jumana, a young mother from Dubai with brown highlights in her hair, the Chandran family with their two kids and Rishabh, a fair boy in his 20s who has shaved off his hair. Some of the guests are total strangers to others. But Chitra knows she doesn’t have to bother with introductions. The ice will break without much effort. It happens every alternate Sunday.

“Last month, I was sacked,” 42-year-old Meera Suresh tells the room. Everyone claps. But Suresh knows they are not being obnoxious. By clapping, they are only trying to change her perspective from despondence to something positive. They are clapping to change what they call ‘the energy’. That works for her. In the company of these people she feels confident that no matter what she says, they won’t judge her. The people here will hear her out, pray for her with their eyes closed and if the prayer is answered, they will clap even louder.

The group that calls itself CT, or Connect-Ticket, began as a newspaper column by R Sridhar. People would mail Sridhar their prayer requests for family members or relatives who were suffering. He would then publish the requests in the column and ask people to pray for them. Sometime around 2001 when the column died, Sridhar decided to formalise the group and mailed all the people for whom it worked, asking them to meet at a temple in Bandra. The members hadn’t seen each other and knew the others only as email-IDs. About 45 turned up. They chatted and prayed. Some spoke of their personal problems in the comfort of strangers. It helped them release their emotions. They all genuinely believed in the power of praying collectively.

Since then, the group has been meeting every alternate Sunday at the home of a member. The attendance depends on convenience, but to Sridhar’s surprise, “it never exceeds the capacity of the room.” Their routine is now pretty much laid out. First, each member is given a chit of paper to write down his prayer request. The prayer, not exactly in the form of a request, is more like an affirmation, a declaration of sorts: “I am a multi-millionaire with no worries,” reads a prayer. The chits do not carry names. They are collected in a plastic cover and kept in the middle of the room. The session then begins with the chanting of Om, widely regarded as a universal sound and not necessarily the property of Hinduism. Care is taken to be non-religious.

Jumana, the Muslim mother from Dubai, had her problems with this initially. "I refused to say Om. As a Muslim, my idea of prayer was only the Koran and Allah.” Then she came around. “In all religions, the sound Aum exists. If you notice, it can’t be played on the keyboard,” says Sridhar, while checking the energy of the room with his pendulum, a small bob suspended from a chain. “It’s pretty high,” he says. If the pendulum swings in a hearty clockwise motion, the energy is positive and high. If it swings counter-clockwise, the energy is negative.

They sit in a circle because they believe energy moves in circular motion. While praying, they hold each other’s hands, right palm on top and left below. “Right is for giving and the left hand for taking.” They also include the prayer requests that some members post on the e-group that has over 400 members, including foreigners. There are some names the Sunday congregation may not be able to pronounce, but they still manage. The prayers are followed by a process called CV or creative visualisation. For that they sit erect, legs folded and eyes closed. They try to visualise the suffering person as cured — having overcome their problem.

Sometimes, the person they are trying to help may not have sought their intervention. Like Wendy Richmund, the woman they read about in the morning newspaper. Apparently she could not say ‘I love you’. Every time she tried to say it, she collapsed. Since they have not seen her or her photograph, each one comes up with their own image of Wendy. “I see a brunette who has dyed her hair,” says Neha. “Plump cheeks,” says Gauri, another member. They then visualise her brain. Someone imagines the organ as, “little grey people”. Another member imagines, “a scared teenage girl” in the middle of Wendy’s brain. Someone else imagines pigeons flying out of Wendy’s navel. They’ve done it many times, not only for people they have never seen, but also for places. The first such experiment was during Kargil, when they visualised Kashmir being surrounded in white light.

At the end of the three-hour session, another kind of bonding takes place. They talk in groups of twos and threes to new members, exchanging phone numbers and philosophy over idlis. No one says goodbye. They all leave with the same promise. “I’ll pray for you.”