How was this even possible?

In 2005, I had posted this about Naadi Astrology and this unbelievable palm leaves that had poems that could accurately give all my details from my birth to the point those leaves were destined to be read. 

It is now your destiny to be able to hear this !! There was no easy way to upload just an audio to a blog then. Now we have methods!

There was no google in 1997 and even then, getting details about someone including their Indian Horsocope which needs date of birth and place of birth with an accuracy of 4 minutes, time windows, family details, names etc.. all in poetry.. not possible with even today's AI and computing power to write those as recitable poems. 

It was just amazing. A lot of folks reached out to me then and I did give them the contact to go find their palm leaves of destiny. However, not everyone who went there, could find their leaf. That is part of the deal. 

Some folks went multiple times over a period of years and managed to find it later! 

All that said, as part of digitizing audio tapes from years ago, found Naadi tapes from when my parents got my leaf and how years later San found her leaf on a visit to Vaideeswaran Kovil. She rushed it and was impatient as she had to come back to a hungry kid. Still you can see two data points.. 

Majority of what was said in detail was accurate. Then again, a lot of stuff was vague when it came to the future. We have two girls. In my reading, that was off. In San's reading it was right. 

If you have the patience, you can listen to this..  pretty impressive actually for a palm leaf that is a few thousand years old and preserved for generations in a temple! 

Maybe our destinies are all pre written.. or maybe there is some time travel involved here. In either case, the beauty of human existence is that we just go about our daily life with amazing selective memory loss. We all assume that we will wake up day after day and do things as we plan them. We put in for vacations 3 months from now, plan weddings, put 5 year FD's, etc.. forgetting that there is no guarantee for anyone for their very next breath! That is actually a good thing, so we can keep moving!

I usually forget this tape exists, except when someone brings up destiny in a conversation. Guess the readers of this blog can scratch their heads after listening.. 

Not sure if these places are still around and do the leaf readings. Have read articles that there are a lot of fake centers and copies floating around. Still not sure how any fake thing can guess this many details right and come up with limmerics in record time while the person is sitting in front of them.. that too in ancient Tamil script!

If any of you have had recent experiences with "meeting your leaf", do share in comments! 

This was out of sight and hearing and out of mind for a good 16 or so years. So it was interesting to listen to after a long time.. especially with Jr. listening in on every word  and asking questions. 

She was laughing so loud hearing my dad keep interrupting the reader about my wedding plans! 

This was way way ahead of Chat GPT !!! 

7am Arivu (Seventh Sense) - Tamil Movie

Friday night.. a last minute impulsive decision to go watch the new movie staring Surya in the theaters with MIL and Cousin..

Off we went with some lowered expectations as the movie got mixed reviews.

Came out thinking "damn, what a different movie! This is definitely a new for Tamil cinema these days. Has been quite some time since we came out of a Tamil Movie thinking.. "

Consider my General Knowledge to be above average, what with being on Quiz teams from a young age but one thing I did not know was that Da-mo, the patriarch who is credited with bringing Zen Buddhism to China and also reshaped Shaolin Kung Fu to China was actually a South Indian Pallava prince! Somehow that part was never taught to us in our history books. Neither was the fact that today's Kung Fu had its origins in Kalaripayattu (which was the original martial art form that this Da-mo or Dharuma (or Bodhidharma as he was referred to) learned in India. Did know what Kalaripayattu was! That needed no introduction.

It was an interesting movie, simply for bringing to light, the lack of interest in self promotion in India and Indians alike.

If you are interested in knowing more watch this video series. This guy did an awesome job of explaining BodhiDharma. Do not know if he ever completed the book. If any of you know kindly drop a note. Should be worth a read!

Every twelve years or so my life encounters something that is beyond my grasp. Something that I have found a new respect for that teaches me that "just because we do not comprehend something, we should not dismiss it. There is a lot we do not know and cannot explain with our limited mental and physical capacity".

The first one was Siddha medicine. When allopathy left me for dead at 12, a 97 year old chain smoking bearded Yogi (who was always in Padmadsana when he treated me) cured me by looking at me, feeling my pulse, looking at my eyes, mouth and feeling my skin and then declaring "this kids blood is not pure. we have to purify it" and went on to give me some heavy metal cocktails that purged my system and brought me even closer to death but revived me. At that time my parents and relatives thought it was nothing but magical. Everything he did has an explanation in modern medicine. Arsenic in small doses can be a cure! Bismuth is used in pepto-bismol ! All said and done he did with baspams, legiyams and thailams (powders, gels and massage oils) what the antibiotics of the early eighties could not do.

My post on that aspect is here. The movie literally echoes my sentiments in the conclusion. (It was funny with the reference to turmeric!. should have started writing movie scripts last year!)

Another 13 years later, there was an encounter with Nadi astrology. Indian astrology is dismissed as gobbledygook by westerner scientists. Don't need to say more. If I can tell you that by analyzing a hair root, I can tell the persons ethnicity, eye color, diseases they are prone to etc. etc. 50 years ago it was laughable. Today we call it genomes, bio-markers, etc. and to the educated few it is not laughable. If it is possible to believe that so much information can be gleaned from a hair follicle, why not a thumb print?

Old posts on this topic Here and here..

Thirteen more years later when physiotherapy said "this is as far as we go!" Yoga has come to the rescue. Initially hesitant that sitting in a hot room at 105 F and 40% humidity would do anyone any good, have seen what can happen if only you believe! Again, it is magical. Folks who are seeing me after a two or more year gap say "you have become younger".

It is a crying shame that there are more Yoga studios in the San Francisco bay area than in Chennai. If only they had taught yoga in the schools in India instead of teaching us "march past" to the beat of a drum maybe my bow legs would be straight by now!

My legs are bowed like my fathers. Maybe it is genetic, maybe it is a vitamin deficiency of sorts but when I bring my thighs together and me feet together, my knees separate. Asked one of my yoga teachers, "how long do you think before this corrects with yoga?" and she said "usually it takes only 7 years".

Will let you all know how it goes in "only 7 years"!

What else is there to encounter another 12 years from now?!

Do watch this movie for the documentary aspect..

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The year that was 2009...

The title of this post was wishful thinking.

Sometimes I just wish, that we are already into 2010!

The last eight months, has not been easy. First it was my dad's heart problem. Next it was my flying visit to India, where I got my foot contused, and had to go through different treatments including acupuncture, followed by some really hectic and crazy schedules at home and the last one month of pain because of the broken arm.

Two days before I fell down, I had a phone conversation with my brother. The end of the phone conversation was about how Saturn (Sani), was in a bad position in the horoscope for almost every member in the extended family. But my brother ended that conversation on a positive note. He told me that out of all the people in the house, I had the most favorable Sani because of my Guru Dasa. For those of you who are not familiar with Hindu astrology, that would be the good effect of having Jupiter shining his grace down on you.

Apparently in the giant struggle between Jupiter and Saturn, trying to bestow their grace or calamity on me, Saturn won!I wonder if Jupiter did a hard fight and maybe that's the reason I'm still alive, because if goodness is what I'm going through right now, I fear to think of what badness might mean!

But then again, the last year has been bad for almost everybody across the globe compared to the previous years!

Everybody I know, who still has a job is working harder than ever.

It is hell for everyone who has lost their jobs.

Then there was the swine flu, or should I say "there is the swine flu"

We don't even want to go into the percentage negativity in the daily news, be it economic, social, you name it.

I do not know how to read a horoscope. I do not want to live my life by what people tell me about my horoscope, but at the same time, I have a very healthy respect for people who are able to tell me things by looking at my horoscope and are right, time and time again. Astrology, maybe more art than science, and I find it pretty amusing when people mock astrology.

In today's world, you could go pick eighth-grader's from India or United States or any other Western country and ask them a few questions about how a tiny seed can grow into a big tree, or how would a tiny sperm and egg have enough information to grow into a full-fledged human being, and they would probably give you answers that would be along the lines of genetics 101.

Thanks to Western science and its widespread propaganda machinery, with good help from what is considered Western scientific thought, the general message out there is that it is okay to believe:

1. Sperm's and eggs contain DNA

2. The DNA is very complicated and different pieces of DNA have different information encoded in them, which contradict the specific traits and attributes of the organism the sperm and egg are going to create.

3. Out of the millions or billions of pieces of information contained in the DNA, select parts can be identified as contributing to specific features by scientific experimentation.

4. It is possible using complex experimentation that a cause and effect can be established for particular parts of the DNA causing particular diseases or haircolor, or height or girth, etc.

If a similar method is adopted to explain certain events in a person's life correlating to certain planetary positions at the time of conception of the same organism, it'll be ridiculed as arcane, esoteric or downright absurd!!!

There are a lot of things that are beyond the comprehension of the average human mind. If a sequence of proteins that is considered to be the basic building block, for the human organism determines the height of a person, or the diseases that this person has (or is predisposed to get), maybe the cosmic rays that deflect from various planets at the time of conception irradiate the sperm or the egg in a way that alters the protein for all we know!

I was thinking about all of this,because I had plenty of time to think about all of this over the last month, lying in bed and staring at the ceiling fan.

A few years ago, I had posted about Nadi astrology, which accurately tells the past, but left the future a little bit sketchy, and for good reason. At that point, I had compared the ability of reducing a person's life history from a thumbprint to particle physics in the context of sample size. Maybe our ancestors had small sample sizes, where correlation was easy and obvious.

Think about the following two experiments...

1. The scientist studies a family of Italians. The entire family has been marrying within Italians for generations. The scientist studies three generations of the family, and finds out that there is one person who has married an Irishman and that family has Irish Italian kids. The scientist proceeds to study the genetic makeup of entire family and tries to see how the genetic code in the kids compared to the genetic code of the family and the contribution from the Irishman to the gene pool.

Eventually, the scientist claims that they have isolated the Irish part of the gene contribution. An ethnic stereotype, may not be the best example. But you could switch it to an entire family of obese people and a single skinny person, or an entire family of short people and a single tall person, etc.

2. A different type of scientist, studies thumbprints of everyone in the same families and cross correlates select features on the thumbprints and finds the one pattern on the print that differentiates the contribution from the odd man out!

The entire irony is in the fact that the thumbprint itself may also be genetically transmitted information, which is a visual representation of the persons genetic code. After all, there are millions of ridges and troughs and loops in every thumbprint!

This post started off somewhere and is ending somewhere else...

In the last month of pondering and soul-searching, with and without the aid of narcotic painkillers, I have come back to the same conclusion, yet again!

It is always good to have a healthy respect for things that are beyond our comprehension. It is also good to keep an open mind when it comes to scientific experimentation or scientific curiosity, and removing a bias that complicated experiments with billions of dollars and millions of samples, along with computerized correlations are in some way superior to similar correlations established by astrologers going back a few millennia!

It is a crying shame, that Hindu astrology or thumbprint reading gets compared to fake things like rope walking or levitation, which are tricks and can be proved to be nothing but tricks.

Where is your Saturn?

ps. my apologies for the multiple posting of the same post. For some reason, the voice recognition software decides to hit the publish post button every now and then.

It is possibly mistaking some of my words as commands instead of text!

I still find it incredibly amazing. I may be typing faster than you can read this, thanks to the software.

I will be back to blogging regularly...

I love you, Ambuja

There is no dearth of love for Sangeetha. There is just someone else, we all fell in love with, on the recent India trip.

The old female elephant at the Vaidheeswaran Kovil, so full of grace, with an ever present smile, she blessed all the kids and me, multiple times for a modest fee of 10 rupees. Do not know her name, and hence we are calling her Ambuja!

We stopped at the temple, because it happens to be the family deity for my maternal side and San's maternal side. After spending a good 15 minutes with my new love Ambuja, we went to the temple "kuLam" or water tank. This, thanks to San praying that, if she makes me throw pepper, salt and jaggery in the tank, my frequent sickness over the first half of 2008 will hopefully stop continuing to the latter half of the year and beyond!

Considering that my hair has survived several tonsure attempts in the name of such prayers over the last decade, I usually oblige when it comes to throwing salt, pepper, jaggery, coconuts, cucumbers, or what have you into anything and everything, in an attempt to save my already receeding hair. "Sure, lets get the salt, pepper combo and dissolve it in the tank! I have done it many times before as a kid, so why not once again?", I said and off we went with the packets.

I flung the jaggery into the tank when the few onlookers gave me a "look"! To our rude shock, there was a sign at the Kulam which said "Please leave the jaggery in this container. Do not put it in the Tank". We were perplexed. This was followed by two dudes who had open boxes (one for salt, one for pepper) with a sign that said "deposit the salt here, and pepper here". I went ballistic! "WTF?!" I told myself in my head, unable to blaspheme in one of my favorite temples.

The whole specialty of this tank was that over jillions of years, people had thrown enough jaggery, salt and pepper to make a giant tank full of "paanagam", which was pretty much a ready to drink super strength "gatorade". My grandpa and grandma used to tell stories of how if they boil rice outside the temple with water from the tank, they would get instant "Pongal"! The special bacteria that thrive in sugar syrup mixed with salt and pepper were probably responsible for the millions of miracle cures reported by the bathing visitors.

In this day and age where a woman pays a few thousand rupees to get eggs, cucumbers, etc. on her face and hair to "fructify" and nurture herself, imagine the power of a tank full of Paanagam?! Healthy glowing skin, beautiful face, god knows what other powers the waters behold. Might have even been an aphrodisiac of sorts, which explains why so many prayers for kids were answered after a dip in that temple tank!

One has to drop off the salt, pepper, jaggery in the pond, then DRINK the water to wash away their sins and heal! How does one heal when you just dump it in a plastic bin? To top things off, dude 1 at the salt container said "Sir, take one grain of salt and one grain of pepper and eat it! only then your sins go away". I was about to give the dude a piece of my mind.. "I paid for the whole plastic bag, you idiot! Can eat the whole bag if I want! Bah. Bah.. Bah!", all said to myself inside my head, as he started repacking my sins, ready to sell them to the next person at the temple door!

The funny thing is, that this happened in Goa a year back when I wanted to light a candle at the Bom Jesus Basilica! They would not let me light the candle, instead there was that same plastic container!! Once filled with unlit candles, it would be taken back to the front to be resold! The prayer paraphranelia recycle business is hitting devotees hard, irrespective of religion.

We did go and drink the water from the temple tank, and it was still sweet! That was a consolation. On our way out, we went to check San's Naadi Leaf. On our way in, we had already given her thumb print and date of birth and they had told us that it is 150 rupees for finding the leaf and another 250 rupees to read the leaf if found.

On our return from the temple, the triumphant declaration was that the leaf was found and San went in to ascertain that it was indeed her leaf. She came out with a big smile saying all the details they mentioned about her dad, mom, me etc. were accurate. Then came the shock. To read the leaf was now 1500 rupees total. This obviously pissed off San to no end. Told her that it was her call and if she wanted to go read the rest, it was okay. After all we visit India once a year and we don't show up at this temple that often!

After about 30 minutes, she got her leaf reading taped. I got to listen to it only earlier today, but heard the highlights. Apparently the tape said San's hubby, aka yours truly is a very "saadhu" and simpleminded person! San was trying to disown the leaf, but considering the rest of the details fit like a glove, this had to be accepted as fact!

Other than that the reading was not as interesting as the one done 11 years ago by my parents! This Naadi astrology has become a highly commercial activity now. Where there was one office, there are now a whopping 23, possibly split factions from the same family that controls the palm leaves.

This time there were no written poems in old Tamizh, just a horoscope on the first page.

The person who did the reading was almost making horoscope based predictions, which any qualified Hindu astrologer would!

The thumb print classification system of these guys still baffles me. How they manage to get the exact names right, based on a generic gods name also baffles me, but my brother says they use a "yatchuni" and read your mind. Possible!

San was apparently irritated, because the guy kept saying she was going to have various problems and that if she did certain "parihaarams" (appeasement), wore certain amulets made of certain metals, she would mitigate the effect and was trying to sell her amulets in the middle of the session. She pretty much walked out early because there were two hungry kids waiting in the van. Apparently in the entire history of the Naadi Astrology place, she was the first one to lose interest after her leaf was found and walk out before the reading was finished.

Either San is a very unique person, or that dude overdid his salesman bit! Looks like the leaves are now a commercial hit, and that does not spell good news for people who actually believe in it, and go seeking what the wise sages wrote for them!

Naadi is still fascinating, but beware of business!

ps. If anyone knows Ambuja's real name, please let us know. She has a special place in our heart!

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