What to bring to a first sitting

A first sitting is easier than people expect and more useful when it is prepared for. Here is what to bring, and what we do with it.

For the chart: three details

The date of birth. Obvious, and still worth checking against the birth certificate rather than memory. A surprising number of people were born a day earlier than the family says, because the family remembers the day the news arrived.

The time of birth, to the minute if you can find it. This is the detail that matters most and is lost most often. Hospitals record it; older birth certificates in Punjab sometimes do not. Ask the eldest person who was there. A time that is off by twenty minutes can move the lagna — the rising sign that anchors the chart — and a moved lagna is a different chart. If the time is genuinely unknown, tell us; we can work backward from the life you have lived, and it is honest work, but it takes longer.

The place of birth. The town is enough. We need its latitude and longitude, and the time zone that was in force on the day — which, for anyone born in India after 1947, is one zone, but for anyone born abroad is worth a moment’s care.

Our janma vivaran form lays these out on one printable page; fill it from the record, photograph it, and send it on WhatsApp before the sitting so the chart is drawn when you arrive.

For the cards: one question

If you are sitting with Lakshya, no birth details are needed. Bring the question, put as narrowly as you can. “Do I take the Pune offer?” — not “what does my career hold”. He will help you sharpen it; that is the first part of the twenty minutes.

The first hour with Sachin

The chart is already drawn. The first ten minutes are the chart read plainly — where the weight sits, which houses are loaded, which period of life you are standing in. Then your question, read against that. Then whatever the question opens.

You will not hear a remedy for sale. You may hear a suggestion — a change of timing, a thing to attend to, occasionally a small observance if the family keeps them — and you will hear the reason for it. You will hear “the chart is silent on that” if it is. And you will be told, if a question turns out to be a narrow one, that the card table next door would answer it faster.

The twenty minutes with Lakshya

The question sharpened, the deck cut, one card drawn. Yes or no, then why. If the why opens a longer question — why this keeps being a no — you will be sent next door to the chart. That is what two readers in one house are for.

Two things not to bring

A verdict you want confirmed. We will read what is there.

And fear. Nothing in fifty years at this desk has been a chart with no way through, and nothing at the card table has been an answer without a reason. Bring the details and the question. The rest is our work.