Geetanjali Krishna: Your future on a palm leaf

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I'm looking at the intricate stone carvings in Vaideshwaran Temple, dedicated to Shiva, the lord of healers. A couple of hours away from Pondicherry, the temple is especially popular with childless women and people with intractable diseases. Devotees bathe in its huge tank as I watch, lost in a reverie. Suddenly a heavy Tamil accent behind me asks if I want my nadi read. It sounds vaguely obscene, and I haven't a clue what he's talking about. Then Anthony, our guide and translator, comes to rescue.

Nadishastra is a form of astrology, he tells me, for which Vaideshwaran town is famous. Its practitioners interpret the works of ancient rishis and sages like Agastya, Koushik and Vashisht, who made predictions about everyone who'd ever live on earth. These writings on palm leaves and animal skins were translated into Tamil about 400 years ago. Today, astrologers in Vaideshwaran Koil scour bundles of these manuscripts, identifying which ones are meant for a specific individual by using his or her thumbprint.

We drive up to the offices of one of the best known nadi astrologers there, Sivasami, to find out more. His office looks exactly like one "" sky blue cabins with glass fronts and computers and the general hum of people being busy. A Japanese couple is in one of them, with a nadi reader and a bunch of dusty looking palm leaf manuscripts. We learn that some of Sivasami's predictions had been published in a Japanese book a couple of years ago, and there's been a steady stream of Japanese visitors ever since. Film stars (Sanjay Dutt's been here) and politicians throng to Sivasami's offices, and everyday, there are enough enquiries to keep Sivasami and his 25 assistant nadi readers busy the whole day.

"When ordinary people read someone's horoscope, their predictions are inexact "" few note the exact time of birth (when the head of the infant comes out of the womb of its mother), without which predictions will mostly be wrong," says Sivasami. "But reading nadi is scientific. For the predictions were made by the rishis who had extraordinary powers and wisdom." Is there a palm-leaf manuscript for every single human being, we ask? Sivasami shakes his head: "predictions are available for only those who, the rishis with their foreknowledge knew, would come forward to seek them. And nadi even tells us at what age a person will seek to learn about his future!"

But not everybody can actually read nadi. Sivasami's own sons don't have the "eye", he, of course, ascertained this by reading their nadi. "It takes over three hours to trace a person's leaf, and as much as a day to interpret it," says Sivasami, "but we can say that up to ninety per cent of the time, our predictions come true."

Nadishastra might owe its origins to the ancient rishis, but its reach today is thanks to technology. Almost half of Sivasami's clients get their predictions through the Internet. "Thirty to forty percent of our business today is online," says Sivasami, "all we need is the person's thumbprint (scanned and emailed) and the responses to an online questionnaire." He tells us about someone from New Zealand, who'd got his nadi leaf read online. "It was so accurate that he has now begun recommending us to all his friends coming to India," says Sivasami.

Back home, I visit Sivasami's website www.srisivanadi.com where the Online Prediction Wizard is a mere click of a mouse button away. This is one of the many dichotomies that make up modern India, I reflect, looking at the hi-tech prediction wizard speaking the language of our ancient sages.