It’s amazing how planets rule over me. Last month the forecast said Venus was enhancing my love life — so true it was! Then Saturn came and spoilt everything. I lost out just as predicted. Sometimes I do feel that it’s all my imagination...sometimes I believe my destiny is unfolding as told by them. Is it true that our destiny is all prewritten and the future can be foretold? Please tell me what to really believe.”

Divya, 17 years old.

Don’t for a minute go about believing that your future is preordained and everything is unfolding according to a plan which is revealed by Divinity only to your favourite astrological forecaster. Sure, it’s fun to know what the stars foretell, fun to fantasise that planet Venus is phenomenally enhancing your love life while Saturn is jinxing it from behind, but know this very clearly, it is a whole load of rubbish.
If you notice the choice of words used by the fortune-tellers, you will figure that he/she never says anything that cannot be interpreted in a million different ways. That basically amounts to asking you to make whatever meaning you want out of it. You are asked to make the words fit the current state of your love or life and then believe the fiction as truth.
Face the facts: There are twelve signs of the zodiac and ten billion people on the planet! That’s eight hundred million per zodiacal sign. How on earth can a tarot card reader or astrologer tell what’s going to happen to eight hundred million people in a single paragraph of shifty prose? In truth he doesn’t have the slightest idea what will happen to his own life tomorrow, for that matter no one does.
But destiny is still not chance, not some arrangement of random events or something pre-ordained by the alignment of stars at the time of birth. Destiny is basically about the choices you make. You should know this now when you are still young and can do something to alter the destiny that is “destined” to happen to you.
Sure, something will happen to you even if you never lift a finger to do anything — life always goes on — but that life might not be what you really like or want. At 17, you should be asking what kind of choices do you really have? What can you do to alter the course of your life?
Most kids think destiny is a choice between medicine and engineering, or that destiny depends on the marks they get in the Joint Entrance Exam; or that destiny will make you marry Mr Right and then life will become a bed of roses. Some even believe that destiny is the cute chick whose dad rented the apartment next door, or, worse, the handsome dude in the next building (with a bigger, sexier bike), who sneaked in and stole her from you. I can go on, but I guess I have made my point.
Destiny is none of these things. These are random events, which happen to everyone all the time. If you do want to bring a real change in your life, then the first thing you should understand is the difference between randomly occurring events and true destiny.
Destiny is not a chance happening which got you a spell of good or bad luck. It’s not the alignment of planets or stars. Destiny is what you bring on to yourself over the long term by the power of your intention. Destiny cannot and will not determine if you will be a doctor or an engineer. It will determine how successful you are in whatever you become.
Destiny is not about the tall, dark and handsome groom who will marry you. It’s about how happy and joyous you remain in your marriage. Destiny isn’t about the things that are not in your hands. It’s about what you do with the things that are in your hands. Destiny isn’t about the set of cards you get when the dealer cuts and shuffles the pack. It’s about how well you play the game of life with the cards you inherited.
It is eventually all about the power of intent. It is about how you can summon that power from within and persevere until it manifests as the change you want to see. Before you begin to re-create your destiny, you need to first stop believing in astrology or tarot or other such hype. Then truly, deeply care about yourself, fervently want the change and sincerely believe you have the power to be who you want to be regardless of what the stars foretell.
That is the steep learning curve of self-actualisation — towards grasping your destiny, which, unfortunately, no college or school will teach, no friends will tell, and with rare exceptions, no parent will energise his child with. Yet that power within is the only force which can alter the trajectory of your life.

The writer is a film director