ASTROLOGY THE GATEWAY TO FUTURE PHYSICS

Our Astrologer, who had prepared our Horoscopes was a lanky man who could afford only two pieces of cloth to wear. A white rough long-cloth (Dhoti) covered him from his waist to the knees and the other an ocre coloured cloth with slokas from Vedas printed thereon, covering his shoulders. He walked bare feet through muddy village roads. He accepted without looking at the sum being offered by the families he visited occasionally, in token o his services. The thought of being poverty-struck never occurred to him, for he valued his knowledge of Astrology, which he acquired in traditional learning centers of Varanasi; the city that has preserved the old vedic ways and its Sanskrit language.

I remember my father a school teacher with barely enough to maintain his family, laughing together with the Astrologer over a glass of tea, when he predicted that I would soon go to a foreign place for some years. It was nothing but a joke for someone who could hardly afford a bus ride to the nearest big-town 60kms away. Yet after the tea, he told my parents to be ready as it must come true. As it happened about a month later a young college professor who knew us brought a form, filed it up and asked my father to sign. In a few months time, after two consecutive exams six students out of thousand applicants won scholarship from Govt of India, to study in costly Prestigious schools. My school was thousands of miles away, where the language, culture and people were all foreign to us, even though it lay within the geographic limits of India. I was indeed in a foreign land for the next seven years. Neither my father nor the Astrologer had ever heard about such scholarships. Yet this person, just by calculating from the position of certain heavenly bodies at the moment of my birth, could predict correctly or in other words, could look ahead into time. Ask a Physicist, and to him this is such an impossibility that he will look down upon you and consider you superstitious.

This is just one instance I am telling as an example. There has been many predictions from him. What will the basic mental makeup of each of our brothers, which direction will be the house and what profession would be of the person to whom our elder sister would get married, when should my father be ready for his likely last hour, when I would fall sick while staying 2000 miles away from home etc etc. Most if not all have come true. Not only for us, but this is true for thousands of families, who have qualified and experienced Astrologers to consult. Later in my life, I have had prediction from other Astrologers regarding nature of my sons, my difficulties in my career etc.

I have been a student of physics and got my Masters Degree from a respectable university. Prior to my college education with Physics, I considered Astrologer's predictions just as something that was available if you wanted, without thinking much about what and how about it. But after studying Physics, I was astounded by this ability to calculate out events in future, even though in an imprecise general manner, from the position of certain celestial bodies.

Should we discard Astrology as superstitious humbug or is the secret of "Time" hidden in the folds of this little understood subject, whose antiquity is equally unknown.