The guarantee nobody has to keep

Think about the guarantee on a fan. The box says one year. That line is three promises. The fan is supposed to run. You have twelve months to find out whether it does. If it stops, the seller must repair it, replace it or refund you.

The last part matters most. It is the only part that costs the seller anything. A promise nobody pays for breaking is not a guarantee. Indian contract law agrees: it defines a guarantee around the word default, meaning who pays when things go wrong.

Now hold two advertising sentences beside that.

"Hundred percent accurate." A statement can only be right or wrong if it could have come out the other way. "Your loan will come through before the end of October" can be checked in November. "A testing phase is indicated in your career" cannot be checked in any month. Almost everything sold this way is the second sort. A percentage also needs a count of predictions written down in advance, and nobody offering the claim keeps one.

"Solved in three days." This one names a deadline. It does not say what counts as solved, who decides, or what happens on the fourth day. In practice the fourth day is not a failure. It is the next appointment, with a bigger reason and a bigger price. When a fan fails, the seller loses money. When this promise fails, the failure earns money.

Indian law does cover claims like these, and a national authority can order a misleading advertisement stopped and fine those behind it. Nikhil Verma could not find orders applying those rules to astrology, so he does not claim they have been used. Consumer forums are smaller and more real. In a 2016 Chandigarh case, a woman who paid Rs 4,500 for a chart got a report describing her as male, and was awarded a refund.

The sentence survives because it is free: nothing to make, nothing to break. It also sorts readers: someone who wants information walks away from it, and someone who wants the worrying to stop walks towards it.