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Comfort food for future-perfect agonisers, forecasting swerves into time pass and the party chic fast lane. Analysing the modern-day predilection for predictions, Manjula Sen encounters New Age pundits who break old moulds
They led Kans and Herod to slaughter newborn males, Macbeth to murder, Sleeping Beauty into a c
oma and many an ill-suited pair into doomed marriages. Predictions, if one goes by lore and mythology, have an uncanny ability to tempt fate. Ironically, for their most truculent votaries, very often they are a case of caveat emptor or buyer beware!
Mamta Ghosh is a 30-something ciggie-waving senior television marketing exec in Mumbai. She and I have two things in common. First, an addiction for predictions. Mamta has gone to the face reader who sits every Tuesday at a South Mumbai café, the horoscopeman in distant Kandivli and the neighbour down her lane who has a reputation for looking into your past with unnerving accuracy. She reads the daily forecast in the newspapers and clicks on online fortune cookies. Advice has ranged from changing residence and gemstones to changing husband. She has spent a small fortune on advice that she never ever follows. (That is the second thing we have in common - exit the door, exit the ear.)
Kundalini and tarot medium, Nandini Zhaveri, says the 'buyers' mentality has a lot to do with it: cheap advice is taken as unbankable advice. And freeloaders usually outstay their welcome. Zhaveri's clients are usually between 25-38. Zhaveri comes from a wealthy jeweller's family. An MA in psychology, she chose her present calling after drawing a blank with many astrologers.
The New Age pundits break old moulds. When a women's magazine that you all love to read had its milestone party at a hip nightclub, the longest queues were not at the bar but at the Marjorie Orr-meets-Linda Goodman avatar seated at the opposite end of the dance floor. Stars, singers, star wives and CEOs shouldered their way through the black-clad throng to where Manisha Singh Dudhaney, tarot reader and psychic healer, held court.
No longer a one-size-fits-all, the market economy has risen to the demand for comfort level, says Arun Naik, a counsellor at the Institute for Psychological Health in Thane. Packaging counts. "Even for problem solvers, a client will always look for a product that suits his status."
During the recent polls, the man, who in a magazine had predicted A B Vajpayee would be penning more poems than helming the country, was being asked for sound bites by a respectful reporter on television. I am reminded of a little tale. An astrologer looked at the horoscope before him. And declared the man it belonged to, a loser. He had nothing - no material possessions, no conjugal companion, no heir. As it turned out, the horoscope belonged to Adi Shankarcharaya.
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It is a matter of how comfortable we are with ourselves. I didn't feel the need to know because my life was acceptable as it was, not perfect, but acceptable. 
