Someone else's chart

Having somebody else's chart read takes about four seconds to arrange, and the person whose temperament, money and marriage are about to be described is the one person in the arrangement who will not be told. The photograph is probably already taken. It is sitting second from the top of your camera roll: a page held flat under somebody's thumb, or a screenshot of a message, carrying a date, a time to the minute, and the name of a town. In the box underneath you have typed four words. Please have a look.

Stay with the thumb a moment, before the send. What is in the picture is not gossip and not an opinion. It is the one set of facts about a person that can never be corrected or reissued. You are about to hand it to a stranger, standing in for somebody who never made you their representative, so that it can be turned into an account of who they are.

The request arrives in a few ordinary shapes. Here are three, all invented, and all common enough that you have probably watched a version of one inside your own family.

A proposal has come through an aunt. Along with two photographs and a page about what the boy earns came a line of birth details, sent by his side for exactly this purpose. Nobody is sneaking anything. And still it is worth asking what he agreed to. He agreed that two families would compare charts in the way families do, with a script both sides know. He did not agree that you would sit alone with a practitioner on Thursday evening and ask, in your own words, whether this is a man who would look after your daughter. The thing he did not agree to is a private assessment of one person by another, conducted in his absence, on evidence he will never see.

The second case is a hiring one. A founder with 11 people on the payroll has a role to fill and three names left. The dates of birth are already on the CVs, put there out of habit by people who have been filling in forms since school. He sends all three to somebody he trusts, as one input among several. The candidate who is dropped will be told the fit was not right, which will be true, and he will spend a week wondering what he did wrong in the second interview.

The third is the one people defend hardest and examine least. Your son is 26 and living in another city. The calls have gone short. He says work is fine in the tone of a person saying anything at all, and you have started lying awake at two in the morning. You still have his birth details, because you are the one who had his janma patrikā (जन्मपत्रिका), his birth horoscope, drawn up. Your worry is real, and I am not going to be clever about it.

The objection a reader might expect from this blog is that none of it works anyway, so consulting behind somebody's back is harmless. That is not my objection, and it is a weak one. Take the method seriously for a moment, as many people reading this do. If a chart genuinely carries information about a person's temperament, their money, their marriage and their health, then having it read without asking is not curiosity. It is going through a drawer.

Now turn it over. Suppose you think a chart carries nothing at all. The reading still happened. You still heard it. By the weekend it is inside your head, where the person it describes cannot get at it.

The chart never met them

Here is the part that holds either way, and it is not about the sky.

The boy's chart is read, and you are told there is a temper in it. Nothing whatsoever has been done to him. Everything has been done to you. At the next lunch you are listening for it. You ask one question in a slightly flattened voice, and you watch how he answers his mother, and he registers, the way anybody does, that he is being examined by somebody he cannot read. So he becomes careful. A careful man at a family lunch looks a great deal like a man with something to manage. You now have your confirmation, and neither of you can see the machinery that produced it.

Nothing in that sequence required the chart to be right. It required only that you heard something and could not stop knowing it. The expectation asks the questions, and the answers come back looking like evidence you gathered yourself.

The candidate has the same problem in a harsher form. He cannot appeal a document he was never shown, cannot say the sentence that would settle it, and will not be given the chance, because the reason he was not called back is one the firm would never put in writing.

Notice what this does to the reading itself. When your own chart is on the table you can push back. That is not me. That was one year, and here is what was happening in it. The absent person gets no such moment, and neither does the practitioner, who now learns everything about a stranger through the one listener who already has a view. It is a worse hour, bought at the same price.

Then the plainest fact, which has nothing to do with doctrine. A birth date, a birth minute and a town, taken together, come close to a name. Ankit has done that arithmetic properly in your birth details, and the short version is that very few other people are standing next to you once all three are known. Once you forward the photograph, that set of facts exists in one more place, on one more phone, filed beside a note about why somebody asked. It will not come back when the match falls through or the role is filled.

Whether the 36-point matching score deserves the authority families give it is Nikhil's arithmetic rather than mine, and he takes the grid apart heading by heading in thirty-six points, and what they actually weigh.

What the worry was for

None of the three people at the start of this is behaving badly. Underneath each request is something respectable: a mother who does not want her daughter to spend forty years being managed, a founder who has been wrong about a hire before, a father lying awake. The chart is not the problem. The secrecy is, because the secrecy is what converts a live person into a file.

So ask them. It takes one sentence, and the sentence is not hard to say.

Our families are matching horoscopes anyway. I would like to have yours properly looked at. Are you willing, and do you want to hear what comes back?

That question does three things at once. It puts the person back in the room. It tells them who will be reading what, and why. And it commits you in advance to letting them hear the answer, which is the part most often quietly dropped. Somebody who has agreed to be matched has not thereby agreed to be graded in private.

You may get a no. The no belongs to them, and it is not evidence of anything hidden. It is also some of the information you were hoping to buy: you have just learned how this person says an uncomfortable thing to somebody they have only recently met. No practitioner can tell you that, and it arrived free.

For the hiring case the sentence is shorter still, because the answer is already clear if you say the question out loud in an ordinary voice. We are going to have your chart read before deciding. If that cannot be said to the candidate, it should not be done to the candidate.

The father is the hard one, because there is no version of the request that turns into a conversation with the son. He is not the other party to a negotiation. He is the subject. What a chart can honestly be brought is a decision belonging to the person who walks into the room, and the decision here is yours: whether to say the plain thing to your son on a weekday evening, and what you are afraid of hearing if you do. Take that to a practitioner and it is an hour about a man who is present. Take his birth details instead and you are buying an opinion about a person who cannot be asked, at the exact moment you could simply ring him.

If it has already been done, and for many readers it has, you cannot unhear it. What you can do is stop it working silently. Say out loud, to somebody or to a page, what you were told and what you have been doing differently since. Better than that, tell the person: I had your details looked at before we met, and I should have asked first. It is four seconds of awkwardness against a year of watching somebody for a temper they may not have.

So the photograph is still there, second from the top. Before you decide whether to send it, answer a smaller question first. Would you be willing to tell the person in it that you did?