Writing
Thirty-six articles, each built the same way: the question as a reader actually asks it, the short answer without making you scroll for it, the reasoning, and at least one observation from thirty years of records that I could not have got from a book. Grouped by what you are trying to work out rather than by the date I wrote them.
Start here
The four articles that make the rest of this list readable. If nobody has ever explained a chart to you properly, begin at the top.
A chart is a floor plan and the houses are its rooms. What each one governs, and why a strain in one is almost always complicated by another.
The sign you tell people is almost never the one a Vedic astrologer reads from. What the ascendant is, and why it reorganises the entire chart.
Twelve signs is the coarse layer. The twenty-seven lunar mansions are the fine one, and most of the practical work — matching, muhurat, dashas — is done there.
The ascendant moves about a degree every four minutes. What that does to a reading, how to find your real time, and what stays reliable when you cannot.
Straight answers
Marriage, work, children, going abroad. These are the questions that fill my day, answered the way I answer them across a desk.
The single most common question I am asked, and the one most often answered dishonestly. How timing is genuinely read, and why a window is the truthful unit, not a date.
There is no switch in a chart marked love or arranged. What the fifth and seventh houses genuinely describe, and what families are really asking when they ask this.
Asked more than any other career question in this country, and sold harder than any other. What the placements mean, and the sentence no chart can say for you.
Charts do not name job titles, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. What a chart genuinely describes about how you work, and how to use it at a real crossroads.
The twelfth house is not a departure gate. What the chart genuinely says about distance and displacement, and why the timing matters far more than the yoga.
The consultation where the most harm is done in my trade. What the fifth house genuinely covers, what it cannot settle, and when medicine is the honest answer.
Almost every chart has one. What the combination technically is, why the word carries far more weight than it earns, and what actually decides whether it does anything.
The moving parts
What is running now, and what the sky is doing to it — dashas, transits, eclipses and the panchang.
The part of the chart that answers “why does it feel like this at the moment” more directly than anything else. How the periods are built, and what they actually govern.
Three phases, seven and a half years, and a reputation well out of proportion to what I actually find in the records.
Saturn is not a punishment. It is the planet of consequence, delay and slow-built things, and the fear around it costs people more than the transit does.
Two mathematical points rather than bodies, and the two most profitable words in popular astrology. What they describe, and how they behave in an ordinary life.
Nothing is going backwards. What retrogression actually is, what a vakri planet does in a chart, and why Mercury retrograde became the internet’s favourite excuse.
What a muhurat is genuinely selecting for, the handful of events where it earns its keep, and the many where it is theatre.
The one transit people look forward to, and therefore the one most easily oversold to them. What a year of Jupiter genuinely does, read from where it lands.
Every eclipse brings a fresh crop of warnings, a good many of them invented within living memory. What the tradition actually asks, and what it never said.
Five numbers that describe a day. What each limb measures, which of them matter for what, and how to stop being frightened by rahu kaal.
Where the fear is sold
Every article in this group exists because somebody was frightened by a word that nobody explained to them.
A placement, not a sentence — and a very large share of the charts labelled manglik carry a cancellation that nobody checked for.
The score is built almost entirely on two Moons, and is silent on the seventh house, on Venus and Jupiter, and on the timing running in either life.
Easy to detect without any interpretive skill at all, which is exactly what makes it ideal for selling a remedy at scale.
A word that has drifted a long way from what it originally described, and now arrives with a price list attached. What is genuinely in the chart, and what was added later.
Aimed at the wrong thing, abandoned too early, done without understanding, or never needed at all. It is almost always one of those four.
How a stone is actually chosen, the questions to ask whoever sells you one, and the incentive problem sitting at the centre of the whole business.
Where the forty-day figure comes from, why an open-ended remedy is a warning sign, and how to give one a fair trial without being strung along.
The most commonly prescribed remedy in the country, and the one most often prescribed to somebody who should not be doing it.
The chapter every practitioner in this field ought to be required to write. Where this work stops, said plainly.
Almost always raised at the very end of a consultation, in a lowered voice. What I actually think, and why the answer is not simply “no”.
A genuine tradition wrapped in a marketplace of fakes and invented grades. How to tell the two apart, and what a bead was ever meant to do.
Astrology now
Apps, algorithms, numerology, and whether any of this is a science. Asked seriously, answered seriously.
I am asked this by sceptics, and by believers wanting ammunition. The answer is the same for both, and it is not the one either group expects.
The calculation is the easy half, and the software does it better than I do by hand. The trouble is everything the software does immediately afterwards.
A separate discipline that borrowed astrology’s vocabulary. What it can reasonably claim, and why I will not tell you to respell your name.
Reading a space
The same method applied to a building instead of a chart.
I am asked this more than any other Vastu question, usually by somebody who has already bought the house and cannot move the door.
Written knowing perfectly well that some readers will use it on me. That is the point — this trade has no register and no barrier to entry.
Each one links to the free self-assessment that matches it. Work through that first — if it settles the question, you owe me nothing.