Cosmic Code

IT IS A Thursday—Jupiter’s day. But the gods feel distant, and P Prashant, 28, is a man unmoored. A year ago, he was laid off from an ITeS company in Bengaluru. And just like that, the job, the H-1B visa, marriage—that sequence of upward mobility preached to every middle-class Indian boy since the IT boom—vanished. He hasn’t told his parents back in Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu, how bad things have become. He scrolls through astrology apps instead, looking not for prophecy but for struc­ture. “I thought I would work abroad,” he says, in his two-room apartment in Tavarekere. He remembers accompany­ing his parents to an astrologer’s office as a child. “The chart shows success, an intellectual career. A life overseas,” he had pronounced. “Since being laid off, I have spent more than `1 lakh on astrology. Perhaps AI will give me the solution no one else could.” Prashant is not deluded. He is navigating life. The machine offers something job portals and recruiters could not: an answer, however provisional, that takes him seriously. And he is not alone.

Astrology in India has always been more than a belief. It has been infra­structure, woven into marriage, finance, medicine, real estate, migration. Now, like everything else, it has gone online. It charges by the minute. It competes with your therapist, your tarot reader, your brokerage app—and sometimes, your god. The Indian digital astrology market is valued at over `40,000 crore ($5 billion), growing at an annual rate of 15-20 per cent. Platforms like Astrotalk, AstroNidan, KundliGPT, ClickAstro, and HiAstro are competing not on belief, but on speed, style, number of astrologers on the platform, and micro-targeted value. They are product ecosystems—colourful, localised, responsive. The homepage does not begin with mythology—it begins with you. Facing career blocks? Trouble with in-laws? Not satisfied in bed? Each issue is matched with a solution: a gem­stone, a mantra, a new premium plan. The transaction is emotional, but also perfectly gamified. A few swipes in, and you are into the loop: free prediction, paid suggestion, tailored advice.

The Indian mind has always held dual allegiances—to the sacred and the rational, to the seen and the unseen. It does not need to resolve them. It prefers to live in the interstice. Now, it has em­braced astrology’s newest mutation, delivered via artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, frictionless, instant and cus­tomisable. The AI chatbots at AstroSage, one of the largest digital astrology plat­forms, are already answering over five lakh queries each day. “For astrology, AI is the final milestone,” says co-founder Punit Pandey, a technologist and an as­trologer. As someone who was the first to launch mobile apps for astrology and then an AI engine, back in 2018, Pandey has watched India’s mystical scaffold­ing evolve into a data model. “Our first attempt at AI astrology didn’t fare well, but now with generative AI coming into the picture, we have seen tremendous uptake after we launched the AI service last year. We have trained our AI on clas­sic texts like Brihat Parasara Hora Sastra, Phaladeepika and Jataka Parijata, and we have been refining the algorithm for over six years,” he says. “So far, astrology has served as a guide at critical moments in the lives of Indians. With AI, it could become a trusted assistant helping with day-to-day decisions.”

It is true. Young people are no longer asking about karma. They are asking about their EMI cycle. Whether this week is good for a performance review. Whether a child should switch schools. When Pandey’s younger brother and co-founder, Prateek Pandey, asked the AI engine for a weight-loss strategy, it rec­ommended martial arts —Krav Maga specifically. “No human astrologer would have known that,” says Punit Pandey. Another time, his 13-year-old son asked the app about rubber textures for his table tennis racket. The machine noted a Mars placement and advised medium-hard rubber, aggressive forehand. It even named a brand. This is modular astrol­ogy, optimised for decisions, not destiny. The mystic reduced to user experience (UX)—and in doing so, made legible to a generation raised on the internet. It is a domestication of the divine.

AstroSage is about to launch an app specifically for everyday decision-making. The logic is that, like weather or traffic apps, if the data helps you make a better choice, you will keep us­ing it. Astrology, in this form, is strictly functional. It can help structure time, assign meaning, and reduce friction. For younger users in particular—those making daily decisions with limited context—it can offer a kind of external structure. You don’t have to follow it, but you feel better having checked.

Astrology also sustains a growing gig economy. At `29 a minute, astrologers on platforms like Livastro log on daily to serve the precariat. V Sethu, a software engineer in Coimbatore who moon­lights as an astrologer each afternoon, says the platform is built for efficiency. The birth charts are generated by the sys­tem and the astrologer on call is a four-minute wait away. There are no rituals, no greetings. Just questions: Will I get promoted? Is this marriage a mistake? Should I move to Canada? Most users recharge for a couple hundred rupees at a time. “Many are in their thirties, for­ties,” Sethu says. “They want someone to tell them it’s going to be okay.” But as­trology doesn’t always comply. During a test reading, Sethu looks at my chart and tells me I will “turn spiritual this year”. I steer the conversation to more memorable queries he has answered in the one year that he has been consulting. He once spoke to an archaeologist who wanted to know if he’d ever make a big discovery. “He hasn’t,” Sethu says, “but I still believe he will.” There is something tender in that “still”—the astrologer as an optimist, not a seer or a salesman, just a man holding space between a question and a world that may never answer it.

One reason this works so well is language. Of the hundreds of astrol­ogy apps in circulation, most now op­erate in at least five regional languages, some in 12. In Tamil, a user might ask whether their “lagnam” is strong enough to withstand “sevvai dosham”. In Hindi, the same anxiety appears as a more open-ended “kya shaadi mein dikkat aayegi? (Will I face problems with marriage?)” The Eng­lish-speaking urban elite were the early adopters. But the long tail of growth lies elsewhere: Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, where belief is strong, and mobile data is cheap. Many astrology apps now push region-specific deals during local festivals.

SIDDHI VYAS, A 25-year-old astrologer and yoga practitioner in Dubai who blends Western and Vedic astrology with psychology, says her clients, many of them teenagers, ask her about love and loneliness. “They feel ashamed of needing love,” she says. They don’t need prediction. They want permission. To hope, to ache, to say that “I want”. To feel shame and still deserve love. Siddhi, a trained psychologist, reads charts like it is therapy, fulfilling one of the oldest functions of astrology: not to fore­tell, but to hold. For astrology has always offered something larger than prediction. It is a system, a story, an armature for the weight of the unknown. Now, it has also become a customer experience. Vyas says the market is exploiting the vulnerabili­ties of her generation, a generation that is sober—“We don’t do as many drugs and we don’t drink, so we need some sort of support system”—but not cynical. “You don’t need astrology all the time. I tell my clients that they can avail up to two read­ings a year. The rest they can figure out for themselves,” she says.

Anjali Raj, 30, a game designer in Hy­derabad, logs on to an app to ask if her boyfriend is “the one”. The app says yes. She remains unconvinced. She tries other apps. “I avoid the AI ones,” she says. “They are cold. If I say he spends too much time with his friends, the bot just recalculates compatibility. It doesn’t ask how that makes me feel.” What Anjali needs is a witness. The machine, for all its accuracy, cannot absorb grief or shame. And yet, the rise of Vedic AI feels less like blasphemy than logic. In India, where cosmology has long coexisted with computation—from astrology-guided IPOs to Vaastu-certified boardrooms—the algorithm is not a chal­lenger to faith. It is its executor. Platforms like KundliGPT and AstroNidan are trained on Sanskrit texts. They are engi­neered to simulate the reasoning of sages. They respond instantly, without fatigue or judgement. The irony of a chatbot parsing karmic doctrine is lost on no one. And yet, it works. This is not the collapse of mysti­cism. It is its systematisation. To believe in AI astrology is to believe in a dual au­thority: the sanctity of the Vedas and the supremacy of the machine. This is not a contradiction. This is India.

Pandey says AI bots on AstroSage al­ready outperform human astrologers by 5-10 basis points. Engagement is high and revenues from AI are growing 20 per cent month-on-month. Trust, it seems, is data-driven. But if a chatbot is your therapist, who holds the boundary? If your invest­ment advice comes from an algorithm trained on horoscopes, where does liabil­ity lie? Can a server console the suicidal? Can a prediction become a diagnosis?

There is something older and more pri­mal at work here—the need for certainty, the need to believe that life is not arbitrary. That the world, no matter how chaotic, is legible. That your personal heartbreak, your bank balance, your family dispute, your delayed exam result—all of it fits into a structure you may not control, but might be able to understand. This is what the apps now offer: the idea of narrative, of shape, of design. In a country where the future can feel like a moving target—eco­nomically, politically, even environmen­tally—the ability to ask “what’s coming next?” and receive any kind of answer, even a probabilistic one, is not just reassur­ance. It is a form of stability. Not everyone buys in. Not everyone believes. But belief is not the point. The point is that you can now ask the cosmos a question at 2.48AM and get a reply in your preferred language, with supporting charts and payment op­tions. And yet, a question lingers. What happens when our search for certainty becomes a subscription model? When our private longings become metadata? When the ineffable becomes a product?

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