It's Supposed to be Fun

Warning. The following episode contains adult language, discussion of miracles, arranged marriages, Channing Tatum, and disclosure of at least one Bible approved stoning. Sensitive listeners take care.

So here's a confession I'm gonna make right at the top of the show. I don't believe in astrology, but astrology keeps happening to me. Now everyone says podcasting is the most visual medium, so I made you a slideshow to try to explain. This is the real Skyline Drive. It's in Delaware, and growing up when I couldn't sleep, it's one of the many places I would drive to look at the stars. This is the moon. It rules our emotions. This is Mercury in retrograde. You know it

Hey Mangesh, I think you had called, so I was calling back. Give me a call.

This is India. When I was growing up, words like "yoga" and "meditation" and "turmeric" and "astrology"? These were words that were part of my Indian life. But they weren't a part of my going-to-school fitting-into-America one. But now? Now everyone has an opinion about it.

I'm a Gemini, which I've heard is bad. I'm a Libra, so I'm indecisive. That's definitely true. I'm a Taurus. I find the start to be beautiful. It sucks that we can't see you stars in New York because of all the lights. I know a few people who are kind of into it, and they're like, asked, yo, did you see the horoscope today? And I'm like, nah, bro, not really, I'm not worried about what the horoscope says.

A few months ago, my friends and I set out to make this show about astrology. We wanted to run around the city and have some wild adventures and understand why after so many millennia, people still looked to the sky for answers. This is an astrologer I met in Queens. He promised me, you're gonna dig this show.

I think if you do your own show will become a super hit, no doubt about it.

This is a graph of how much I believe in astrology before our session. Not that much. This is a graph of how much I started believing thirty minutes later when something horrible he said came true.

That's why I asked again from the time he started a couple of years back. Still now, the situation doesn't look good.

This is me traveling halfway around the world to answer the biggest question my entire life. This is a shop in India where your fortune is waiting for you. It was written centuries ago and put on a shelf and the shopkeepers know which one to pull because it's coded by your thumb print and the time you're going to walk through that door. This, this is me walking through that door. I'm Mangesh Hattikudur. From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Radio, this is Skyline Drive.

So I figured, you know, I do need to stone an astrologer. And there are a bunch of astrologers on the upper west Side. It was set up with these...

(laughing) Wait! So, you're looking for an astrologer to stone?!

Oh yeah, well I needed to check it off the list. I've got a hundred things to check off...

You know, already this reporting and starting off weirder than I thought. It's ten o'clock on a bright summer day and I'm standing here with A. J. Jacobs.

I am an author and a journalist and a Pisces.

In addition to being a Pisces-- or technically on the cusp of Pisces and Aries, A.J. is a friend... and he's one of my favorite writers. I've come to meet him in this neighborhood because in 2007, he wrote a New York Times bestseller called The Year of Living Biblically. The book was a phenomenon. It came out in multiple languages, There were magazine and TV pieces about it. It was such a big deal that at one point Marlon Wayans was lined up to play A.J. in the network TV version.

The premise was that I would follow all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible. So that meant the famous ones: like the Ten Commandments and 'love your neighbor,' but also the lesser known ones like 'you cannot wear clothes made of two different kinds of fabrics,' so I had to get rid of all of my poly-cotton blends.

Giving up poly-cotton blends is just one of the hardships A.J. endured in the name of journalism. He also grew a massive beard, shoved a wild bird so he could steal its egg and say a prayer on it, and he followed 700 other Biblical rules literally in an attempt to understand religion. And somewhere along the way he decided that to fully appreciate the Bible...

... you actually had to stone people who committed these abominations. And the abominations included adultery, breaking the Sabbath, but also astrology, witchcraft, divination, they're all sort of lumped together.

Just the fact that he decided to stone someone was a shock to me. I mean, A.J. is one of the nicest people I know, but that's how committed he was.

I didn't want to go to jail for assault. I just wanted to check it off my list, you know, stone an astrologer: check! So I walked by this astrologer on the street and just very subtly dropped a pebble so that it landed on her shoe

(kind of a drive by stoning)

And I was thinking, she's probably not even gonna notice because I just kept walking. Oh she noticed, and she's like: "what what's going on? Why did you do that?!" And so I had to tell the truth, because I was following the Bible. I thought maybe she'll think it's funny. She did not think it's funny. She was pissed. She started yelling at me like, "F you, go to F'in hell!" I was rattled. Even if you're trying to stone someone

Rule #1: don't stone an astrologer. This wasn't the advice I'd come for, but I wrote it down anyway. The thing I'd really wanted to know; the reason I traveled all the way out here to meet with A.J. was to ask him how to make this show... because doing a show on astrology? It actually makes me nervous. Like, is there a way to talk about how accurate a fortune-telling parrot could possibly be? Or is there a way to joke about whether an astro curse can make you bald?

I had that exact dilemma when I was writing The Year of Living Biblically, because I was coming in as an agnostic writing about religion. My big overall advice is go in with deep curiosity. Don't go in with an agenda that you're trying to disprove or prove astrology. You're just an explorer. So go in with no axe. Leave your axes at home.

That I think I can do. After the break, we talk to an astrologer who doesn't believe in astrology, take a subway ride to Queens and hear this from my mom:

"I felt like a Jersey Cow."

CHAPTER TWO: JUST FOR FUNDS

Is the phone listening? Is that? Are you listening through the phone? Pattern? AI? The algorithm? That is The Pattern?

Back in 2020, one of my friends shot me a text linking to this video of Channing Tatum. The actor had uploaded it himself after using an astrology app called The Pattern. But when Channing's readings became a little too spot on, he freaked out.

Are you listening through my phone? And then just regurgitating the stuff that I'm afraid of? And stuff? You know what? Pattern People-- you should just call me. I need answers right now.

Poor Channing. I don't know if he ever got his answers, but what I do know is that astrology is ubiquitous and lucrative. One venture capital investor told The New York Times that the app Co-star, a Pattern competitor, had the potential to be a twenty four billion dollar business, claiming he could one day be as big as Spotify. But if astrology is as big an opportunity as everyone's saying, I'm wondering if my company should get into the act. After all, it feels so obvious that-- I don't know--

Hey Anu, why did you bring me to this closet?

I brought you to this closet because I wanted to pitch you on an astrology app? Are you ready for it?

Booooooo...

Why is that? What do you think about astrology?

It's dumb.

Oh gosh, well, maybe you're not the right person for it, but the reason I came to you is because you actually have a bank. You spend only my money. You seem to hoard all your money. And you keep all of Henry's money as well, which you charge him a small fee for. So I thought you might be the savvaest person in this family. Is it okay if I pitch you an astrology app?

Uhhh... Okay.

So here's my case for it. These aren't your grandmother's horoscopes, right? They're talking to you in this very fresh and fun way. Uh, they're up to the minute with the latest NASA data. They look beautiful, and they have a chat feature where astrologers will chat with you live about your birth charts. Right? And then by 2019, right, like you can see astrology is

Mind blown!

I can't tell whether you're serious or not, but apps made forty million dollars that year. And in fact, the next year, when COVID really hit, people started searching for birth charts and astrology. Both of those searches hit five year peaks on Google. So it's no wonder that all these venture capital funds had started investing in astrology apps early and then continue to invest... and I'm here to ask you to invest in my astrology app. What do you think?

Um, Anu... I'm spending my money on a skateboard, not on you.

Okay, well, so Ruby, what type of business would you invest in?

Bubble guuuuuummmm!

[laughing] Okay. CHAPTER THREE: TRUTH AND POETRY When you go out with a recorder in hand, it's interesting to see who will talk on tape. We found scientists at NASA who actually wouldn't talk about their interest in astrology to us because they were afraid of losing their jobs. We found PhDs and post-docs who were worried that if they talked at all to our podcasts, even to say

My grandfather showed me a little half of a peanut that had this germ in it, and he said, that's going to become a plant. And it was just things like that that got me interested in the world, which is the same as being interested in science.

Jaime is a celebrated science writer

and I'm Sagittarius, although you would not know it from looking at anything about my life. I've got some planet in Capricorn that explains why I'm not an impulsive adventurer.

She has a new book coming out called The Possibility of Life and she's co editor of the annual Best American Science and Nature writing volumes, and whether it's chatting about our garden or the way we perceive constellations, her capacity for wonder is incredible... and infectious. But perhaps what I love most about Jaime was how she clarified that science and astrology don't actually have to be at odds with one another, that we don't need science to disprove astrology.

In terms of astronomy, astrology doesn't hold a lot of meaning because it's all very human centric. From the point of view of looking at the stars from Earth.

The stars are light years apart. They have no real relation to each other except in our minds. But that relationship, the one we make up while looking up at the stars, that means something... or it can mean something, if you want it to.

It's like a much more eloquent, poetic personal fortune cookie. And I don't mean that disparagingly. I just think that it's for you to take from it what you need. And like we don't think it's anti-science to say a poem is true. I think that's where science gets defensive, is when people say that astrology is a science and has physical roots in the stars. It's like, oh, no it doesn't. But it's true the way a poem is true.

I can't tell you how much I love that. I mean, as someone who's a skeptic but also a romantic, this idea that astrology is true the same way a poem is true? That feels right to me. And it's something my friend Pete also said when I talked to him. Pete's deal is, well, it's complicated.

So like even though I was like a semi-successful musician, I was like, I need to make money somehow, like right now. Like what other skills do I have? Oh, I do astrology.

Pete is a rock star; like a real rock star. He used to be in The Walkman, that massive seminal Indie rock band. And yes, his backup career was professional astrology. When he was younger, he trained with this big famous guru. He was living in his guesthouse and that's where he learned to read star charts.

You would take them back to him and he would say like, "no, it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard." Like "you're wrong." You know? And then he kind of, in very traditional style, like yell-at-the-apprentice sort of thing..."

Kung-fu master thing?

Right. Very very karate kid kind of feeling, right.

But here's the other thing: Pete doesn't even believe in astrology. He's a rock star who does astrology for politicians and World Bank economists and all sorts of interesting folks, but he doesn't believe in it.

It's this art to me. And I don't mean that dismissively. Like, that's like my whole being. Like, that's what I care about.

What he believes really is in a more vivid reality, a kind of embroidered view of the world. Pete and I both spent formative years in India, and we have a certain comfort in the magical.

If you read like a hundred Years of Solitude or something like that, world of like this kind of magical Columbia. You know, it's like that felt very similar in a lot of ways to how we were raised.

Magical explanations have been woven throughout my life, like why was my family's little community in India so well off a century ago? You could say it's because of luck or global economics. You could say it's because when the Civil War was happening in the US, England actually needed more sources of cotton to replace all the cotton that the US had been producing. And my family they just happened to be in the right place to manage mills

Oh, that's funny. Okay. Umesh's aunt, Shardakka-- she came to see Amma because she'd heard that, you know, I was available.

I guess this story starts, of course, with two families... dusting off their kids' horoscopes and handing them off to a trusted astrologer, not some low-level quack.

So they matched it, and it matched perfectly.

The traditional Indian matching system is way more complicated than just saying: is he a Scorpio? A proper celestial marriage is supposed to be a union of souls, so the astrologers inspect all the vagaries of your chart and pressure test everything like your personalities, your feelings about class and status, even how a couple's health will be affected by one another. It's all on a scale of 36 points, and any

My parents want to make sure that the man I married did not yell at me... so she asked the astrology, you know, how is his nature? So the astrologer told Amma that he was a gentle creature you know, never lost his temper.

So this part is true: I've only ever heard my dad yell a handful of times, and most of that was when our dog Lupini would just race out of the house, and he would run after her with this like slice of Kraft singles cheese, just waving it to try to tempt her back. And it always worked because she was super greedy.

But one fault he'd have has never come on time to the table to have dinner. And we thought it was a big joke and that came true. We couldn't believe that astrology could be that powerful to tell a quirk like that.

Wasn't there something else with the mother-in-law?

The mother-in-law? Yes, they said that I would be best for a boy that did not have a mother. I really don't know. They said was something to do with the stars, and if I had a mother-in-law, it wouldn't go well. So here Umesh had lost his mother when he was under a year, I think, or just about a year. So it was perfect.

This is something I think about a lot, how astrology accounts for everything. My dad had an aaya or a nanny, but he never had a mother. His life was a series of hostels and boarding schools, sometimes in cities hundreds of miles from his home. It makes me sad to think about. But if his mom had survived, my parents would never have been together. Astrology would have made sure

I wasn't ready. I was still studying and it was in my final year for master's studying linguistics. I didn't want to give that up, and I didn't want to get married that fast. So I felt like a Jersey Cow. I wasn't happy. And things were really moving faster than I ever expected, so I said, I'm going to foil this.

So, just to get the picture, a typical woman hoping for a match would be waiting, sitting by her parents, dressed in a sari or something traditional-- like making a big show of what a quiet and obedient wife they could be. And instead...

I had a mini-skirt on. And I had a Lambretta. I rode that and came.

Oh, and she's also late. Like my mom is the most punctual person I know. She gets to the airport three hours ahead of time, and that's since I was a kid. So she's clearly trying to tank this thing.

And my hair-- I had let it loose. It was curly and wasn't done. But instead, you know, Umesh's aunt said: "Oh, that's no problem. We love modern girls!"

What type of woman do you think Ammama was expecting to present?

She wanted them to know that I was absolutely sensitive and very loving, very kind and gentle with everyone, and an animal lover.

But my Grandmam was also incredibly honest, so she was sure to tell my dad's family this:

I had no interest in cooking.

Anyway, despite my mom's lack of interest in the kitchen and her dramatic attempt to topple this whole affair, she somehow still won my dad's family over.

So Amma said: "here's the deal. Let him write to you. If you don't like him, it's fine."

He was a charming writer.

He was a charming writer.

So they wrote letters back and forth for a year, and when they finally met in person?

... you know, he looked so vulnerable that I said, "oh, this is great. I can handle him."

My parents don't have a perfect marriage, but there are lots of wonderful bits... things that make me think those 32 points mean something. Like once when they were young, they visited Paris, and they went to dinner at this fancy restaurant with a ballroom, and an orchestra started playing and no one was dancing... crickets! So my dad just whisked my mom onto the dance floor and then slowly everyone in the

My cousin Nana. The girl that they looked for the horoscope matched with him.

Who's your cousin, Nana?

Nana from Mangalore. So there was a danger of his brother dying if the girl married Nana.

The astrologers predicted that if the couple went through with the marriage, even though their horoscopes matched, it could lead to Nana's brother's death. I mean, who wants that on their hands, even if it's putting your chances for love at risk.

So to this day, he still a bachelor.

Really? Well, what do you think about that?

It's a shame. Yeah, they could have found other girls, but he just was dejected. He said no more girls; no more horoscopes. So he's still a bachelor.

That's heartbreaking.

It is really is.

After chatting with my mom, two things occurred to me: First, the chasm between the way Americans and Indians use astrology? That only felt wider. Like no app was going to tell you to quit your MBA to marry some guy in America, or to break it off with this girl because it could bring bad luck or death to another family member. Like the starkness of the way Indian astrology can be used to control lives-- it felt so dark. But also... pretty intriguing. Like, it only made me want

I think you gotta go all in. So you've got to hire an astrologer to help you with the show. Figure out when you should start; when should the air date be; who should you hire to help you? Should it be a Virgo or a Capricorn? Like, go for it, because that's one way to test it is to see: does it work for you?

So I decided to find an Indian astrologer and solve both problems. I could lean into my Indian side and also have some fun with it. But what I didn't know was that that visit was going to change my life. CHAPTER FIVE: WE GO TO QUEENS On April 9th, I headed to Queens to meet an astrologer. He's someone my friend and showrunner for the show, Mary recommended that I reached out to. And coincidentally, he happened to be an astrologer that my cousin Aditya had used. Hey, Adit.

Hey, how's it going?

How are you?

Good, good.

Adit is another rational type. He's kind of this white-shoe lawyer; masters from Cambridge. And he used this astrologer in a difficult time... and apparently the predictions had proven accurate. So Adit actually wanted to see him again. So I took a train to Jackson Heights to meet Dr Rakesh Kumar. And we entered his white wood frame office. From the outside, it's kind of nondescript. Like this row house. But when you

So Mangesh, looking at the chart: May 1, 1979. 12:04 in the afternoon in Summit, New Jersey. You're born on a Tuesday. You have the sign cancer rising....

I've got to say, I was a little surprised by how quickly Dr Kumar dives in. It seems like he's just staring at a bunch of numbers on his screen, but he's interpreting them, kind of like Neo from the Matrix. And I'm curious to hear my reading. But what I really want to do is asked Dr Kumar about the show. I thought it would be fun if there were these auspicious dates for my podcast, or if you could predict something about how many people would listen. But first-- he had some questions for me.

So how's what been since January?

Um, that's when I decided to quit my job.

So either you would have quit your job, or the job would have quit you. One of those things because the times are such, because it impacts your karma-chetra, you're work area. It's so ironic, you come here today. Four days from now-- April 13 onwards, thereafter a new chapter of your life begins. Another beginning of your life, which will be very good.

This is what I came for. I write down April 13th in my notebook and I circle it big. Four days from now. That's the date I'm going to get started on my show. Dr Kumar continues with more work related things. He says foreign travel is in the cards, which is super exciting, and that I should wear an emerald to improve my communication skills, which is funny. I make a note to do an episode on gems and vedic astrology down the line.

So it's very profound. So you'll make it big in life. You'll be very successful in everything, because your planets show that.

I'm so excited about all this tape. Getting a start date for the show; the talk of gems; this prediction that everything might go well, that I'm caught off guard by Dr Kumar's next question, which comes out of nowhere.

Tell me something about your father. Um, like what he did for work or it still does.

He's a chemical engineer. He's retired. He's ill right now. Listening back, I don't know why I mentioned my dad was ill. Dr Kumar hadn't asked, and maybe it's because I was trying to participate fully, like I thought I should let him know. Years ago my dad was diagnosed with cancer, but he actually sailed through that treatment and he's been cancer-free for a while now. But recently he

Because that's why I asked again: from the time he started a couple of years back, till now, situation doesn't look good for father. There is risk to father.

This thing about my dad? It was a throwaway line in the middle of an hour and a half interview. I don't even know how closely I was listening. By the time we hit stop on the recorder, I was thrilled. I had over an hour of material and I was cutting tape my head as I was asking questions. And I know I felt good. I thanked Dr Kumar for his time, and I let him run off to feed

Table for two? Thank you.

And then twenty minutes into chatting and laughing and debating what's real about astrology and what isn't and how can you even tell, right? I received this email from my dad. It read: we just received the results of the MRCP testing. Unfortunately, the news is not as good as it could be. We'll talk to the doctors and let you know as soon as we can. Study results diffuse metastatic disease throughout the liver and bones from unknown primary.

Am I ever going to have sex with somebody again?

And we use astrology to get her an answer. Thank you so much for listening. I have so many people to thank. Skyline Drive is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. The show is hosted and written by me Mangesh Hattikudur, with a ton of help, like SO MUCH HELP from these wonderful people. Mary Phillips-Sandy is our cat-loving supervising producer. Mitra Bonshahi produced this whole thing, despite my constantly getting in the way. Mark Lotto is our incredible story editor