Horoscopes—Harbingers of Horseshit

Horoscopes—harbingers of horseshit and tireless troubadours of trite truisms—because what better way to reassure yourself that your life isn’t a meaningless slip-and-slide of disappointment and dysentery than to consult some Bengali blabbermouth who claims the distant nuclear flatulence of stars can actually dictate if you’re going to have a shitty Tuesday?

For fuck’s sake, how—HOW—did we, the obsessive offspring of Aryabhatta, Varahamihira, and other celestial savants, end up entrusting our decisions to constellations that vaguely resemble arthritic goats, angry crabs, and couples fucking in embarrassing positions? We’ve stooped so low that even our imaginary animals are now arthritic—utterly Bengali, utterly fitting.

The daily horoscope column, that glittering epitome of bullshit literary brilliance—published dutifully in every local rag—is as essential to Calcutta’s morning routine as acid reflux or a violent, ghee-laden fart after a night of biryani binge. The city that once gave the world rational thought and fierce logic now insists on measuring success, failure, and the prospects of gastroenterological violence by which meaningless alignment of glowing balls in space one was born beneath.

Consider the astrologer’s art—“Jyotish,” from Sanskrit, meaning “light-bringer,” though the only light these charlatans actually bring is from the matchsticks they sell to desperate morons trying to see meaning in the darkness of their dystopian diarrheal existence. How quickly Calcutta, city of intellectual pride, of scientific revolutionaries and quantum romantics, surrendered reason to a pack of celestial salesmen peddling planetary poop. What cosmic irony—reason replaced by ritual; dialectics deposed by diarrhea.

I blame this on our Bengali penchant for poetic paranoia: why see chaos where conspiracy could lurk? Why admit our inadequacies when it’s clearly Mercury retrograde twisting our scrotums? Each planetary misalignment becomes an existentially convenient scapegoat—Mars responsible for marital misadventure, Venus blamed for venereal vexations, Saturn for all Saturday sadness, and Jupiter—fat fucking gaseous Jupiter—for the jiggling bellies that wobble down Park Street at dusk.

But maybe—just maybe—the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves, dear idiots. How is it that Calcutta, city of Tagore and Bose, of rebellious brilliance and anarchic artistic enterprise, has sunk to interpreting planetary diarrhea as divine doctrine? Perhaps it’s a reflection of our decadent dystopia, our hemorrhoidal horror, that we grasp at straws, clawing desperately at celestial excrement for comfort.

Picture this pathetic daily drama: a bloated babu in Ballygunge, swatting mosquitoes the size of sparrows, picking through parathas, screaming for tea, frantically scouring the horoscope column to determine if his chronic constipation will finally clear today. “Ah! Jupiter is favorable!” he proclaims, lubricating his mind with false hope, the tea scalding his tongue, symbolic of life’s constant disappointment. And yet tomorrow, he’ll again return faithfully to the daily bullshit, reinforcing the Bengali bondage to planetary phantasmagoria.

This is the great modern marvel of Calcutta: dystopian diarrhea dished out in printed form, astrologers conning Calcutta citizens out of their hard-earned, dwindling cash with flamboyant flair, their prophecies as reliable as a cheap prophylactic—likely to break exactly when protection is most desired.

Why this horoscope horror show, you ask? Because admitting randomness is admitting defeat; because acceptance of chaos bruises Bengali pride; because we can’t bear the thought that life, like a bad bowel movement, is fundamentally meaningless, devoid of any celestial significance.

Thus, Calcutta remains caught, pants-down, squatting helplessly at the intersection of superstition and science, desperately interpreting the cosmic skid marks of universal underwear as profound revelations. What cosmic joke! What celestial circus!

And still, we read them, these sinister snippets of pseudo-prophecy—astrologers feeding us the equivalent of literary laxatives, guaranteeing us nothing but disappointment and dysentery.

But perhaps there is meaning after all—perhaps the true lesson, the real revelation, is that humanity’s greatest strength is our tragicomic talent for delusion. We are the species that dared to dream, invent calculus, explore quantum physics—and yet somehow simultaneously believe a fucking ball of flaming hydrogen billions of kilometers away actually gives two cosmic craps about our romantic incompetencies.

Thus, I remain stubbornly skeptical, sourly cynical, permanently pessimistic—because if life truly were ruled by celestial farts, why bother wiping? Why, indeed, bother at all?

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