LEAVES OF LIFE -PALM LEAF ASTROLOGY B YOUR THUMBPRINT ONLY
By Shoba Naidu It’s amazing to find bundles of palm leaf writings bound by thread and preserved for centuries Written by the sages of yore, the hoary predictive art called Nadi Shastra is said to hold the key future generations You meet a stranger. He tells you your name, age, profession, name of your parents and spo number of children, tales of past life exploits and your future prospects. All this from ancien palm leaf manuscripts, written at least 2,000 years ago. Truly disconcerting! And this is not fiction. Such experiences are commonplace with experts in possession of these leaves spread out all over the country and abroad. In Tamil, nadi means "in search of". Says Durai Subburathnam of Sri Kousiha Agasthya Mahasiva Vakkiya Nadi Jothida Nilayam, Chennai: "The person whose palm leaf record ex with us will definitely approach us at a predestined time specified on the leaves." The process is simple. To locate a manuscript, the thumb impression of the person is taken o paper, left for women and right for men. But opinions differ. While Subburathnam claims t these are classified into 1,008 types, Delhi based nadi reader B Raju says that there are only types. The palm leaves are also arranged accordingly. Finding your leaf is not as easy as giv your thumb impression. It is a painstaking job to match the two, sometimes it takes several Says Raju: "If we are unable to locate the leaf, we ask the client to come again after a few d we have to get it from our native place. Or we refer to Sukshma nadi, which gives brief predictions." These leaves also give you the planetary positions in the person’s horoscope. " the confirmation stamp," says Raju. "The past life details and future predictions were written by the great sages centuries ago. D divine insight they could look into and write the details of all who would one day go for a na reading," explains Subburathnam. The leaves once located are "sung" by the readers in an Tamil verse, which is simultaneously translated into the language of the client’s choice. And today’s hi-tech world, you can even get future recordings on audiocassettes. "Pleasant or unpleasant, we do not add any prediction on our own. We only read whatever is written on leaf. You can also read your name, if you know the language," says Subburathnam. The pro of becoming a nadi reader is rigorous. "The apprentice, usually a family member, has to liv gurukul for 10 years." There are different theories on how predictions are made. Late Dr B V Raman, former edit The Astrological Magazine, had done major research on the nadi. He believed that this syste special and original to Indian culture and genius. Till the 1930s, nadis were a sealed book ev the majority of Hindu astrologers. Raman felt that nadi writers based their predictive