Is life treating you badly? Are your parents or children giving you grief? Is your spouse cheating on you? Has your business partner duped you? Has A. Raja upset you? Don’t worry. Turn to astrology.
Star gazing has now revealed life’s basic truth: You can’t trust anything any more. Forget snooping on your child’s social life. Forget Facebook fraud. You cannot even trust real faces. Nobody is who you think they are. Not even your mother. Perhaps not you either. While you were not looking, the earth moved.
For example, I was a Libra. A nice, balanced, fair person. Now they tell me there was a mistake. I am not really a Libra. In fact, it’s my father who’s the Libra, and not a Scorpio as we believed. I am just a Virgo. My mother’s not a Capricorn as she claims, but a Sagittarius. My husband’s not an Aries, but Pisces. However, my daughter remains a Leo. She must have refused. She is given to shaking her baby head cutely and saying “No-no” in the sweetest but firmest way.
Your universe has changed, they tell us. Kindly adjust.
So who moved my universe? As always, the buck stops with mother earth.
She may seem all steady and firm, but actually she’s pretty wobbly. Over thousands of years she has wobbled ever so slightly away from the moon and the stars around her. And thrown the zodiac — conceived about 5,000 years ago — out of kilter.
In short, your horoscope is out of date. If you still want to go by it, you need to update it.
Which is why some have suggested reintroducing the hitherto unused 13th zodiac sign, Ophiuchus. It seems that this large constellation has always been known, but was apparently set aside by ancient wise guys who settled for only 12 signs in the zodiac.
Now that the earth has moved significantly away from the planetary positions when the zodiac was set up, there is enough loose space to stick in Ophiuchus and tighten up the zodiac to fit our lives again.
Of course, the other zodiac signs have to move up a bit to let in the new member.
Get used to Ophiuchus. (No, not “Oh-f***-us” but “Oh-fee-you-cuss”.) Ophiuchus or the Serpent Bearer is depicted as a man struggling with a huge snake. That’s you if you were born between November 30 and December 17. In fact, if you wish to update your own horoscope, here’s the new floor plan. See how rare the Scorpios have become — they only have six days to be
born in.

Capricorn: January 21-
February 16
Aquarius: February 17-March 11
Pisces: March 12-April 18
Aries: April 19-May 13
Taurus: May 14-June 21
Gemini: June 22-July 20
Cancer: July 21-August 10
Leo: August 11-September 16
Virgo: September 17-October 30
Libra: October 31-November 23
Scorpio: November 24-
November 29
Ophiuchus: November 30-December 17
Sagittarius: December 18-
January 20

Curiously, most Western astrologers seem unhappy with this suggestion. So what if the earth has moved? Their calculations were based not on the actual positions of constellations but on some mathematical calculation (which I failed to grasp) of the sky which was not affected by this planetary wobble. They will stick to their 12 zodiac signs, thank you. And you will get to read just that in the papers every day. Be happy with what you get. So if you have always felt that you were a Lion trapped in the body of a Virgin, there goes your chance of rectifying your future.
Closer home, the Indian horoscope does go by the planetary positions and changing constellations. It would be interesting to know how Vedic astrologers feel about this suggestion. Do they already take these shifts into account? Much has changed in the universe of late. Pluto has ceased to be a planet. And National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) has just discovered a new solar system with six planets around a star. Does any of this affect our Vedic astrology? Does it also affect Vaastu? Should we tear down our homes and build them anew to make them future-friendly?
Should we care? Yes, because we seem to bow to the powers of astrology more than to everyday reason. We even name our children according to the astrologer’s chosen “first alphabet”. In a country where even our leaders don’t budge without an okay from the family astrologer, where raahukaalam paralyses even the most “progressive” politician, where a chief minister apparently sleeps naked on the floor to ward off evil, it may be time we gave this some thought.
If you like the fun of it all, there is a lot you could do. You could move to tarot readings. Or to Naadi — where apparently the life you live today had been written out on a palm leaf thousands of years ago. Or we could just embrace numerology and control the future by adding funny alphabets to our names. All else failing, there is always the soothsayer parrot. When faced with a paradigm shift in astrology, we clearly have an embarrassment of riches.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com