The Journey Within

  A divine window to meet our ancestors Pitru Paksha is the fortnight each year when the doors between our world and the world of our ancestors stand open. In 2026 it runs from Purnima Shraddha on 26 September to Sarva Pitru Amavasya (Mahalaya) on 10 October. This is not a gloomy season of the dead. It is a divine blessing, a grace built into the calendar itself, that lets us reach across lifetimes and connect with those who came before us. Every one of us exists because of them. Our body, our family name, our habits, even our first prayers came down to us through their hands. For these fifteen days, that connection becomes easier to feel and to act on. The question is: what do we offer them? The origin: Karna's second chance The story of how Pitru Paksha began is tied to Karna, the great warrior of the Mahabharata. Karna was known as Dāna Vīra , the hero of giving. No one who came to him with a request ever went away empty-handed, and he never fell short in his duty of charity. Ye...

The wager Here is the trouble with testing astrology. It speaks in the language of "good phases" and "hard years," and you cannot put a good phase in a spreadsheet. Moods don't have timestamps. Luck doesn't have a decimal point. So the believer and the sceptic each go home convinced, because there was never a scoreboard to settle it. Unless — you pick the right life. Somewhere out there is a person whose fortunes are written down every single working day, in public, in rupees, by millions of strangers who have never heard of his birth chart and don't care about it: a man whose net worth is a listed share price. When his empire prospers, the number climbs before lunch. When it stumbles, the number bleeds in real time. That number has no opinion about Jupiter. It is the closest thing astrology will ever get to a lie-detector. That man is Mukesh Ambani , and that number is the share price of Reliance Industries — printed nearly every trading day since 199...