I was born on a Ram Navami day (birthday of the ancient Indian King named Ram, who is also considered in the Hindu religion as an avatar of the Supreme) and my grandma promptly named me Raja Ram (raja means king). In a land and an era where ‘arranged marriages’ were the norm, my father used to take bundles of horoscopes of prospective grooms for my eldest sister to a famous astrologer in town.  All of 9 years of age, I used to accompany him in those trips. This astrologer was a professor of mathematics at a local University. The detailed discussions that used to take place between him and my father attracted my attention, and a strong inquisitiveness in astrology was born.

I have always been a good student of Mathematics, having almost always scored 100% in all exams through my schooling and up to engineering level. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued by the inherent connection mathematics bore to astrology, from very young days. In fact, astronomy (a branch of physics), astrology (a branch of science?) and mathematics (the mother of all sciences) all seemed intricately related. In my spare time, I learnt more about this ‘pseudo science’ reading old astrological text books. 

Around this time when I was exploring the basics of astrology, a mysterious incident that took place is worth a mention. There was a soft-drinks shop just outside my engineering college hostel where I used to regularly go to drink lime juice during hot summer. Once while I was in the shop, I saw a queer saintly old man sitting on the veranda near-by and resting. He asked me in a sign language if I could offer him a drink, which I promptly did. After drinking the juice and while returning the glass to me, he looked at me and said “learn astrology and benefit others” in a vernacular language. It was strange how he knew that I was fascinated with astrology. I never saw that old man again although I often looked for him in the shop vicinity. 

Thus began my tryst with astrology several decades ago. Being a science and engineering student, I wanted to learn it as  scientifically as possible, collecting empirical evidences widely and keep fine tuning my learning and interpretations. Do I still consider it to be a ‘pseudo science’? Hard to say. Do we consider quantum physics to be science? Yes we do, although it too provides just a predictive and probabilistic model of matter. Well, that’s a topic for a blog, which you will find in my blog posts elsewhere in this website 🙂