Dates .. astrology and the pope

Every time i read Your day today column in the newspaper i get impressed by the astrologer... not because of his future-predicting skills but because of extraordinary skills in the language, and framing of sentences he has. personally i dont believe in astrology based on the birth days... or numbers. I guess these guys earn livelihood based on a weakness everyone has , the wish to know how the future is going to be.

every time i look for this column with interest it would generally be a weak moment for me.

We all use calendar , and dates to remember events occurred in the past and use of these dates to let someone predict our future. Most of us take these numbers called dates for granted and seldom know or want to know about the construction or the history of calendar which is a complicated story. Calendars have been constructed based on repetitive events in the nature like the earth`s rotation abt the sun or the moon's rotation abt the earth , ancient times it was complex calculations based on stars like the Mayan calendar.

but these repetitive events do not repeat in a whole unit of time .. making the calendars based on them a bit inaccurate ( remember the addition of one second to time in 1998).

The currently used calendar is the Gregorian calendar named after Pope Gregory, it was incorporated in Oct 1582 , before that it was the Julian calendar in use.

When the gregorian calendar was incorporated , 10 days were removed from the calendar , after October 4 it was october 15 , Great Britain and its colonies adopted it in 1752 .. by that time the error in Julian calendar had gotten one more day in it so they had to drop 11 days from the calendar ... it seems there were riots at that time by workers that it is some conspiracy to deny them 11 days salary.

The gregorian change was an attempt to make the calendar more accurate (dont ask me the meaning of accuracy here, how much accurate is accurate enough.... does it really matter if the stars and all the heavenly bodies were in exactly the same position and orientation as at the time of my birth for me to believe it is my correct birthday) , i wonder if the correction in the calendar has made the astrological predictions any more accurate.

i got all these thoughts as there are two days of concern ahead for me along with some standard questions waiting .... my birthday (whats happening on the marriage side.. any news ??) and the valentines day (what are your plans for the day ?? )

:)


signing off with these lines of Ghalib

Dekhiye paatey hain usshaaq buton se kya faiz
ek birahman ne kaha hai ke ye saal acha hai.

Ghalib has preceded the above lines by a more beautiful couplet ,adding here for completion

unke dekhe se jo aajaati hai munh par raunaq
woh samajahte hain ke bimaar ka haal acha hai