When I read a new paper, I start with the sports page, because human endeavors fascinate me. My best friend begins with the horoscope section because he prefers early guidance to the day.

Nothing wrong with that, except the COVID situation has exposed, as per my view, how VOID these predictions are.

Just go back to your favorite Astro-site and check the yearly forecast for 2020, Feb/March onwards! Not a single of them could foresee the pandemic coming. Instead, most preferred to highlight chances of conflict between spouses, promotion for a specific section of Zodiac sign, and international travels for some during this time.

International travel, seriously?

Here is my view. As the Lehman Brothers incident of 2008 clipped wings of the flamboyant global credit rating industry, COVID-19 will see readers begin to question whether astrology predictions are worth the ink.

The “mystical services” market, which includes astrology as well as services like aura reading is now a $2.2 billion industry. This industry has embraced the latest technologies well; such as E-commerce, Gamification, and now, Augmented Reality. Impressive. But the question is, what if the user disbelief sets in – but even more, the critical question is, what’s next?

Is hyper-personalization the answer for this industry going forward? Will stones, rings, and lockets be replaced by an IoT bracelet that has capabilities to study the users’ daily behavior and feed the data to a Machine Learning algorithm to contextualize planetary movement in this vast expanse of the Universe? I am sure prediction accuracy will go up, and it will be specific for the user; not a generic one. I would n’t be surprised if this is already on the cards.

Neither the planets nor most of us are static during the day. Due to this, life prediction at the beginning of the day is half not as useful by the evening. IoT could make Astro predictions real-time and fix our insatiable thirst for fortune-telling, 24/7.

IoT is rapidly replacing human intervention on a shop floor, patient monitoring, and traffic management. Astrology could be its next frontier.

I wonder if the Pandit Ji has a forecast for himself given the circumstances.