Why your astrologer is wrong about you...

Before I explain to you why the details about the minute of your birth as you know it is wrong, I just want to tell you about this story that appeared in the papers last week. 

"An innocent pregnant woman in Nellore had acid thrown on her belly by her in-laws after a doctor informed them she was carrying a girl."

Bastard doctor. He deserves to be arrested and thrown in jail along with those in-laws. 

Oh wait, I'm sorry. I misspoke. It was an ASTROLOGER who PREDICTED she was carrying a girl child. But don't allow that to affect your response. Should not the astrologer also have been arrested here? Did he not start the chain of events? 
He did not suggest they throw the acid, you say? But... but... neither do radiologists now, do they? And yet you are okay with them being arrested for the prejudice of strangers who come to their clinics. But leave it, who cares about silly Indian doctors, eh? Radiologists are a dime a dozen so we can afford to lose a few thousand of them, I'm sure. 

No, today I want to talk about the people who check out Uranus.

Astrology uses the precise time of your birth alongside the alignment of celestial bodies at that particular moment in time to predict your destiny. 
Unlike what you may believe, astrology does not belong to one religion. Not even to one country. Fortunately or unfortunately, the Indian/Vedic variation of this is quite specific in its answers. Crores stand by it and check it even today, using it as either a rigid dictum or at the very least, a road map of the path they should look forward to.

And I have a few issues with that.

Freewill goes out the door by its logic.

Every event of your life has already happened in the stars - we are just waiting for you to catch up. 
It covers everything from 

• whether you should drive a two wheeler or four wheeler TO 
• whether you should be a doctor or engineer TO
• when you will go to England, America or Gulf (surprisingly most of the astrologers reading the beads and charts only ever see these countries in the stars; there's never a Sweden or Ghana.)
• whether your two year old son will have two children or three TO
• how you need to marry your daughter to a dog/frog/tree to make her turn from a cursed father-in-law killer into a normal woman TO
• whether to throw acid on the stomach of the woman whose entry into your house you celebrated a year ago because she has a baby of the same gender as you TO
• silly insignificant things like the person you should spend the rest of your life with (which is again surprisingly, never a person from another religion. Because Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus all know that inter-caste and inter-religious matches are blasphemous, after all.) 

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How can you claim to be a trustworthy science when the success rates are 50% - the same as a coin toss? 

For every one person who stands by it, you will find someone who followed the path set and had it blow up in their face - marriages deemed perfect that did not last six months, people warned of the year of their death who lived for decades beyond, people who were informed they would settle abroad who still work a kilometer from their ancestral home even today.
50% accuracy is not good enough.

• Vernon Clark's blind tests between 1951-1970 had a 59-72% accuracy. Again... not good enough when 'your variables are constant'. 2+2 cannot equal 4 only 59% of the time, can it?
• The New York Suicide Test Press of 1977 collected 311 birth records of suicide victims and allowed astrologers to check them out. No significant findings, explained away as there being 'no astrological signature for suicides'. Ya, right. I'm convinced.

How do you get to choose just a few planets and say they influence our lives while millions of others formed by the same celestial process don't? 

Considering that there are a billion celestial bodies, how can our moon and Saturn be influential but not the moons of Saturn themselves? Is there a reservation quota?

Is amniotic fluid stronger than an asteroid belt?

• The influence of these planets travel millions of miles to affect you individually. Yet, after piercing through fellow planets and moons, this same power comes to an abrupt standstill just outside your womb waiting for you to come out? Is that not weird? As any pro-life activist will tell you, the baby is alive many a month before the actual delivery.
• Sticking to your stand, if a 100 babies are born at the same moment across the world, are all 100 hypothetically destined to be hit by a 100 cars at the exact same moment on their 22nd birthday? Why not?
• What if you tell me the right time? If I force my wife to deliver by Caesearan section at 8:05 am, I'm basically guaranteeing my child's future as a rockstar, right? I can cheat Saturn & Jupiter and change my son from being a bird brain to becoming an Einstein, right?

The difference between broad guidelines and specificity works against them here. 

For me, there is an inherent difference between this and the sun signs I read. Ya, that's probably contradictory but I am willing to accept my flawed notion here. See, that's how it goes - accepting that we are flawed.

From where I see it, the Sun Signs have 12 very broad caricatures - they do not speak specifically to you or demand of you. They do not say all Aquarians will have miscarriages in May or all Gemini will 'go to Gulf' for work. They definitely do not label you a manglik and a burden to your worried parents from the day you were born.

Preying on people's fears

Yes, a big factor is the gullibility of families who pay good money with no receipts to a guy who they then grant full permission to dictate the course of their life; but fear of the future and being gullible is not a crime. People taking advantage of the insecurity of others; that is a crime.

Your basic interpretations are flawed.

• You make or break relationships based on your interpretations which differ from astrologer to astrologer. Interpretations that you say require absolute blind faith without evidence in the very same world where 66 long years ago, Watson & Crick were successfully able to identify the minute double helix structure of DNA first isolated in 1869 by Miescher. Proof, if it exists, can be found by hard work and determination even if it takes a hundred years because you know where to look for it. If it does not exist, even a dozen centuries will not suffice and you will have to demand blind faith.
• You force people to spend lakhs on religious rituals to avert bad things even though you yourself state the future is fixed at birth. If Uranus has confirmed that I am going to get hit by a falling piano at the age of 30, why should I spend my family fortune on rituals to prevent it? Surely my thousand rupee note cannot bribe that big blue bugger in the sky, can it?
• You link unrelated topics ('marry before the age of 24 or your father will die') and thus push the journey of an individual in that particular direction; the answer preceding the question.
• You actually kill people. You delay medical aid by pushing people to choose religious offerings over surgical assistance, delaying treatment and causing more harm.

Cowrie shell divination: Popular in West Africa & India for their powers.

It DOES NOT make you a better person. It DOES make you a a shell-racist though, 

believing these shells are more pious than others. 

It is obvious by now that I don't believe. And yet, I am directly connected to it.

You see, here's what you don't know. I am the time keeper. I and millions of doctors like me or para-medical staff are the ones in labour rooms and operation theaters across the world who note the time of birth and call it out loud.

And I offer you zero guarantee that my watch is the correct time. 

As a simple test, last year I helped deliver a newborn in our operation theater.

I called the time of birth at 8.58 am based on my watch. Simultaneously, I checked three other time pieces in the same room. 

The clock on the wall - 8.57 am.

The watch on my anaesthesia technician's hand - 9 am.

The multi-parameter monitor on my anaesthesia machine - 9.02 am.

Four options. Four times. All four different. And any one of those four could have been called out as your official birth time.

Do you see where I'm going? When an astrologer says with full certainty that you being born at 9 am means you are cursed, he is invariably wrong. Because you are dependent on any one of four watches and unlike Mission Impossible, all the members of a hospital do not synchronize it before entering the ward daily.

Having said all this, in today's world, I really wish I knew the nuances of astrology if only for one specific reason.

In my home state, I often find words like shudha jadhagam or paapu jaadagham bandied around by parents, astros et al. In essence, it is 'a fault in our stars' which means that you need to find someone else with that same label or else your future will be bad.

If I knew that somebody was going to make you persecute your child for the rest of his/her life based on a random time that I put down in a file, would I change it by a minute or two if it would spare your child? I know my answer...

I would want your child to live a happy life without any sense of persecution or being called a burden to their family because of where Jupiter and Uranus were when s/he was born.

Nobody deserves to be born guilty.

Even if it has already been indoctrinated into your mind for so long that you cannot see yourself as anything other than cursed, always remember this: just because you are a Slytherine does not mean you invariably will be evil and nefarious. You can choose to be Snape - the bravest, most noblest depiction of love - too. 

You can choose your destiny. Saturn won't mind.

Authors note:

From my side, I will ask this -

1. If you truly believe that astrology is reliable, would you not feel better if it were confirmed under controlled circumstances? It has failed in the past but we can always try again. Medicine allows for decade long studies that span continents at times. Surely, we can do better studies.
2. A chief issue in defending astrologers is the amount of vagaries - wrong time of birth, differing opinions, varying interpretations of the same horoscope et al. Well, if so, then don't they have a legal responsibility to have that disclaimer out where every potential client can read it and judge for himself whether he should bother at all to consult an astrologer?
3. If a prediction goes wrong - if heaven forbid, the 10 out of 10 matching occurs and the blushing bride becomes a widow two months later - do they own responsibility and apologize?  More importantly, would they? Should they legally come under a consumer protection act, considering they are providing a service that often has no receipts and yet, changes the course of lives?

Let the bouquets/brickbats come (keep the brickbats civil though!).
I want to know where you stand on it. I want to hear your opinions and anecdotes that made you a believer/non-believer in astrology.