Mercury retrograde comes to India

Every few months the planet Mercury looks, from here, as though it is sliding backwards across the sky. It is not. Our line of sight changes as we pass it, and the sliding is what a chart records.

The English phrase now arrives with a list of instructions attached: do not sign anything, back up your files, expect messages to go astray. Nikhil Verma asks how long that list has been in Indian speech, and how anybody could tell.

He cannot give a year, and says so. He has not read old Indian newspapers and will not date what he has not seen. Google Trends does not settle it either. It starts in 2004, and it reports a proportion rather than a count of people.

What can be shown is the wording. An Indian almanac website lists Mercury's turns under a Sanskrit heading, then explains them with terms from modern Western practice, including a "shadow" period he has not found in any Indian manual. Indian pages that sell readings run the whole thing in English. A Hindi newspaper article from July 2026 explains Mercury using the English word "communication", spelled out in Hindi letters. Borrowed words travel with the idea that brought them.

Then he checks the older books. Indian astrology grades a planet by how it is moving, and backwards motion sits at the top of that scale, not the bottom. The classical writers disagree about what such a planet then does, and he shows the disagreement instead of hiding it. None of them speak to everybody at once for three weeks.

The last part is what the import pushed aside. India already had an instrument for deciding when to act: the almanac's timing rules, computed for one place, printed with hours, and tied to particular acts, such as the weeks when weddings stop because Venus or Jupiter is too close to the sun to be seen. That instrument can tell you a rule does not apply to you. The imported warning cannot. It is on for everybody, and it costs nothing to publish.