As above, so below!

For the first time this week, I had a look at my horoscope. I actually did not even know I had one. I was a little intimidated and at the same time intrigued by what that piece of paper and those markings are supposed to represent. If people are to be believed this was a window to my past, present and future. Somehow that is a tad bit difficult to get down my throat.

Astrology actually comes from Greek, ἄστρον (astron), "star", and λόγος (logos), "theory", "study": lit. study of the stars. The idea being that the position of celestial objects has something to do with personalities, human affairs and terrestrial events. So studying the relative position of these bodies can help us understand, interpret and somehow predict the future. Most of the time I am amazed at the complexity around me. The human mind is exceeding complex and the universe is worse. As human kind we have trouble predicting the weather tomorrow, or how the stock market, which is our own creation, will behave in the next trading session. When an astrologer says that he can predict how my life will pan out, it seems ludicrous.

Look up at the sky sometime when the power is out and what you will see is simply a huge collection of random dots. So its easy to imagine something like this, one warm moonless night, a long time ago, a little girl looks up to her dad with longing eyes and says "Papa, drawing karni hai". Poor dad is all out of stuff to paint with but you know how dads are with their little bundles of joy and voila, any idea! Out come father and daughter into the open and our little girl exclaims with infinite joy, "Wow itne saare dots". Couple of nights later we have our constellations! Quite possible, isn't it? I just wish though dad and daughter were a little more imaginative as the Airtel ad managers and they came up with cute little dolphins instead of the scorpions and lions. But I guess you have to forgive them, after all they did not have the internet!

The point is if it is connecting the dots then a millions pictures can be painted. So we have a set of two complex systems, people and the stars. You start drawing bridges between them and you are bound to hit upon some, there is no doubt about that. But more often than not you will end up with no correlations at all. What would really interest me is the ratio of right predictions to the wrong predictions. I wonder if such a number exists but science and astrology are not very friendly, the probability of that number existing is low. That being the case, there is really no known evidence binding the stars and terrestrial events. There is no consensus among astrologers themselves as to whether the position of stars is a merely pointers/markers to events or if the celestial bodies actually influence life on the earth. You would think after 5000 years they would have at least figured that out.

A couple of days ago, I happened to see a movie called Maqbool which is an interpretation of Macbeth. This movie illustrated the classic problem with astology. If somebody tells you something is going to happen in the future, you are already biased whether you like it or not and there is no way to wipe out that bias. A wise man once told me "it is difficult to be a spy in another country, not because you cannot learn a new culture but because it is impossible to forget your own". With no empirical evidence to support it, the basis of astrology as a discipline in the modern era is shaky at best. So the question to be asked is with my inability to unlearn should I subject myself to the predictions of an astrologer or am I better of without him?

In September of the year 2000, the Supreme Court issued a notice to the Ministry of Human Resource Development stating that the introduction of astrology to university curricula is "a giant leap backwards, undermining whatever scientific credibility the country has achieved so far". I guess that answers my question pretty comprehensively!