This is how the Age of Aquarius starts

The last three times that Saturn was the Year Lord, the world had a major new epidemic or pandemic each time. Representation pic

There was a song back in my schooldays, by an obscure band called the 5th Dimension, whose words everyone knew.

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelations
And the mind's true liberation.

Aquarius felt like a nice thing to have dawning. After 2,000 years of muddle-headed, glutinous Pisces fog, we were being promised lovely lives with harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding, all that good stuff.

No one expected overnight change, naturally. There would be chaos. But Mikhail Gorbachev was Pisces and Ronald Reagan was Aquarius and between them, they were dismantling the USSR and the Berlin Wall, so we had all the proof we needed.

That was around 1990. This is 2021 and now my school friends and I are feeling a little shortchanged. Because the foul Donald Trump, and lies and more everywhere, Brexit, moronic Hindu nationalism and brutish leaders, fake news, white supremacy, black lives that don't matter, QAnon, Chinese super-surveillance, tsunamis and cyclones, endless wars, Uyghurs being ethnically neutered, and now an apocalyptic pandemic that only seems to be getting worse - none of these exactly feel like the dawning of anything nice I decided that astrology, like homoeopathy, was essentially faecal.

So imagine my delight when I read that we'd all just been expecting too much too soon. The Age of Aquarius, I'm reliably told, actually formally started on December 21, 2020. Things are going to get better, believe it or not.

For the rest of this column, it will help enormously if you don't ask over-intelligent questions such as Do you really believe all this poppycock? Let's say I just like it more than what I hear on Republic TV from the rather rude jackass who runs that show. .

Important things, apparently, have been happening in the sky. Since what is happening on the ground, especially in Delhi and Maharashtra, has so far been heart-wrenching and achingly painful, I decided looking at the sky might be a smarter bet. Perhaps it would make me feel better while the world ended around me.

By gum, it did.

On December 20, Jupiter and Saturn, our two largest planets, came into perfect alignment - called a conjunction - exactly at the starting point of Aquarius on the zodiac. This rare event happens once every 400 years; the planets will stay put in Aquarius till 2059. Astrologically, think of Jupiter as your favourite uncle and Saturn as your PT teacher who never smiles.

What does all this mumbo-jumbo mean?

According to one astrologer, "The past twenty years have been a preparation for adopting the new rules of the coming age. 2020 will mark the final year of the outgoing Piscean Age and will be a defining year for humanity. It represents the summing up of the past and the establishment of a new and far better order."

Think of it as a moment when things change irrevocably, ready or not. Politics will shift towards progressive, towards people rather than authoritarians, and away from tired, corrupt, obsolete ideas. Good will fight evil and win.

The conjunction happening at zero degrees of Aquarius apparently means that the world, all of us, is heading for a brand new start on a clean slate.

Really? you might mutter. Cause it sure don't look like a new start with the number of people being cremated in parking lots in Delhi.

I dug around some more and learned that Saturn will be the dominant planet - called the ‘Year Lord' - for the next few years. The last three times that Saturn was the Year Lord, the world had a major new epidemic or pandemic each time.

March 1917-April 1918 - The Spanish Flu, which infected 500 million and left 50 million dead.

March 1968-April 1969. The Hong Kong flu, that killed about a million people worldwide.

March 2009-March 2010. Swine flu, which infected 1.4 billion people globally.

Clearly China didn't set the virus loose, Saturn did. So what's coming up for the rest of the year? It's going to get worse, the stars foretell, peaking in June or July. The next six months will be a roller coaster but inevitably, the virus will run out of new people to infect and like all other pandemics, it will settle down as an endemic disease, becoming a part of life.

Why, you might wonder, have I made you read so much dope-driven magical thinking in a column that prides itself on hard data and intelligent conjecture? My alternative was to believe the government's elegies about how masterfully Mr Modi had vanquished COVID-19. Or listen to the Union Health Minister calmly claiming that "we were in the endgame of COVID-19".

You know, if I had to choose between two evidence-free statements, I'd pick astrology and a golden age of living together in peace. It gives me more reason to hope than this government does.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.