pandit is always right?

Last month, my friend Karan wouldn't stop talking about his new flat at dinner. Three bedrooms in Baner, the one he'd been saving for since 2019.

"When are you moving in?" someone asked.
"Pandit ji said Shani is bad until April. We'll wait."

The flat is sitting empty, means he's paying EMI in a place nobody lives in.

I asked him if he'd considered just moving in anyway.

He looked at me like I'd suggested something dangerous.

I drove home from that dinner still thinking about his answer. He had spent five years saving for this flat.

And now he's waiting on a pandit's calendar to tell him when he's allowed to live in his own house.

Karan isn't superstitious, he runs a SaaS company.

He makes data-driven decisions for a living. And yet, for the biggest financial decision of his life, he handed the timing to someone reading planetary charts.

I wanted to understand why this holds so much power, even over people who should know better.

Last week, I posted a reel about this.

Half the people agreed. The other half told me I was disrespecting Indian culture.

But what really caught my attention was the pattern inside every astrology app I looked at while researching for that reel.

It starts with a free horoscope that plants just enough worry, then moves to a paid consultation to explain what’s coming, followed by a remedy you can buy to stay safe, and eventually a subscription to keep you protected.

It's a funnel. And it works because of something a British psychologist discovered in 1960.

In 1960, Peter Wason at University College London ran a simple experiment. 

He told 29 people: "I have a rule in mind. The sequence 2, 4, 6 follows that rule.
Your job is to figure out what the rule is.
You can test any sequence of three numbers, and I'll tell you if it fits."

Almost everyone immediately thought: the rule is even numbers going up by two.

So they tested 8, 10, 12.
"Fits the rule." 20, 22, 24.
"Fits the rule." 100, 102, 104.
"Fits the rule."

At this point most people said: "I've got it. Even numbers, ascending by two."

Wrong.

The actual rule was just: any three numbers in ascending order. 1, 2, 3 would have worked. So would 5, 11, 47. Or 1, 100, 1000.

Almost nobody discovered this. Because nobody tested a sequence that might prove their theory wrong. 

They only tested sequences that confirmed what they already believed.

Wason called this confirmation bias.

Your brain looks for evidence that supports what it already believes, and stops looking the moment it finds some.

When a pandit says "difficult period professionally" and something goes wrong that month, you remember it clearly. 

When that same month also brings a promotion or a good deal, you don't update the prediction. 

You remember the one time he was right. You don't keep count of the times he wasn't.

Over years, that builds a track record in your head that feels overwhelming.

Pandit ji is always right, except the scorekeeping was never fair to begin with.

Karan's situation has no visible damage. Yet.

Others aren't as lucky. 

There are entire calendars published in India listing astrologically approved dates for surgery.

Families postpone medical procedures because "the timing isn't favorable."

Kundli matching requires a minimum of 18 out of 36 gunas to align before many families will even consider a match.

Couples who are compatible in every way that’s relevant get rejected over planetary positions.

Weddings collapse into a handful of auspicious muhurats each year.

Every family is competing for the same 40-odd dates.

Venue prices spike, caterers book out months in advance, and families rush decisions on budgets and guest lists because the alternative is waiting another full year.

Every Diwali, the BSE and NSE run a Muhurat Trading session timed to the most auspicious planetary hour. 

India has some of the most sophisticated trading infrastructure in the world. Once a year, we pause it for a planetary alignment.

And it's becoming a very big business. 

India's astrology app market was valued at $163 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $1.8 billion by 2030, growing at 49% annually. 

AstroTalk alone crossed ₹1,200 crore in revenue in FY25 with ₹285 crore in adjusted profit. It hit 50 million app downloads with 1.5 million users paying every month.

The business model is confirmation bias, productized.

The app surfaces every prediction that seems to land and lets the misses disappear into notification history.

And the fastest growing segment are the urban millennials and salaried professionals. 

People who would never make a business decision on gut feeling, but will delay moving into their own flat because Mercury is in retrograde.

Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto spent years studying what he called "Myside bias," a close relative of confirmation bias. 

His finding across multiple studies: the magnitude of Myside bias shows very little relation to intelligence.

Being smarter doesn't protect you. 

In some ways it makes you more vulnerable, because intelligence gives you better tools to construct explanations for why the hits counted and the misses didn't. 

You don't build a weaker case for your belief instead you end up building a more sophisticated one.

Stanovich found that this creates what he called a "bias blind spot."

The smarter you are, the more convinced you are that you're thinking rationally.
Which makes you the last person to notice when you're not.

In India, astrology touches every major decision from the moment you're born. 

By the time someone is 30, they have a lifetime of family dinners where the pandit was right. Where the astrologer predicted something and it came true. 

The times he was wrong never make it to the dinner table. Nobody brings those up.

That's decades of selectively remembered evidence, reinforced by family, culture, and now by apps designed to keep the pattern going.

That's confirmation bias working in real time. You don't go to the pandit with an open mind. 

You go hoping he'll confirm what you already want.

And when he doesn't, you're stuck, because now you have an authority figure disagreeing with a decision you've already made in your head.

Karan still hasn't moved in. I don't think one conversation changes decades of conditioning. But he did admit something that I think matters.

"I've never once called a pandit hoping he'd say no."

That's the starting point. Not rejecting astrology. Just noticing whether you're seeking a decision or seeking confirmation. 

Because those are two very different things, and most of us have never stopped to ask which one we're actually doing.

What decision are you sitting on right now because the timing doesn't feel right?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every email.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. Next time you're about to check your horoscope, ask yourself: have I already decided what I want to do? If yes, you're not looking for guidance. You're looking for permission.