Mumbai, Aug. 5 :    Mumbai, Aug. 5:  Is a one-to-one with God facilitated by Sanskrit? Stotras, or prayers, dedicated to every conceivable deity, are filling up the shelves of music stores. If mata di bhajan is for the masses, the stotras are for the classes. Uttered in shuddh Sanskrit, the CDs and cassettes are the high end of the spiritual market, not to be clubbed with the bhajan or aarti that plays out of street corners. The stotras are for the busy guy about town who likes his prayers private and his Sanskrit perfect and would prefer to offer his prayers in the debabhasha even if he doesn't understand it. He is the guy who would be more comfortable listening to a sleek stotra CD on his car stereo - the chants would rather be called chants and not anything vernacular - than to Maata Navaratri or Durga Kavach. And be ready to pay for it. While the average Hindi or regional language bhajan belongs to the Rs 35-category, a chant cassette fetches around Rs 65. So the gods are running out. Topping the list is the Gayatri chant - available with almost every record label - which has been at the head even before the stotras became a music store category. Then come the Ram chants - 108 chants of Ram, Ram raksha stotram. Then a huge procession follows - there are the Ganesha chants, Mahalakshmi chants, Vedic chants, the Sacred chants of Shiva, Himalayan chants, Sacred chants of Buddha, chants of Moksha, chants of Surya and Nirvana Mantra, to name a few. A Times Music spokesperson said the company would not produce another stotra immediately, because all the gods were exhausted. 'The devotional music market, including stotras, always existed, but the recent chants are a metro and 'minimetro' phenomenon,' said a Sony Music product manager. 'It is the frozen food concept. With the chants, we are taking advantage of the fact that the city guy doesn't have the time to pray.' The prayer-made-easy, which has grown over a year or two, seems to have found a ready market. 'Though the ball was set rolling by Times Music, now there is every company investing in the high-end market - there's all of Sony, Polygram, Music Today and BMG Crescendo,' a music firm executive said. Keeping the urban listener and his limitations in view, the chants are skillfully packaged, coming often with a kit of explanatory notes. The Vishnusahasranam stotra from Sony comes with a compilation of these shlokas that were a conversation between Bhishma and Yudhisthira, with notes in both English and Hindi. The cassette is a far cry from an earlier version of the stotra, at least in terms of appearance. According to the Sony Music executive, a whole lot of new background research is also going into the recording of the chants. 'We lay utmost stress on rendition and authenticity. For our Vishnusahasranam stotram, we employed a research team for the background work. We also pay special attention to enunciation. The devotional music segment is a word-of-mouth market. It takes a minor slip to be branded as bad.' The boom of the chants, however, hasn't drowned the other voices. The countdown to the Ganesha Chaturdashi has a number of bhajans and aartis lined up. There are also cassettes on the mother goddess in the offing. Devotion, which is said to have about an 18 per cent share of the music market, is booming.