Odd pop ups

[chickenfeet]

I am a fairly frequent visitor to cricinfo.com which, on this side of the Atlantic at least, appears to be strongly geared to the Indian diaspora. Thus, pop up ads are mostly for money transfer services, discount long distance, off shore rupee accounts and the like. Recently though I have noticed a significant number of pop ups for astrologers and soothsayers of various kinds. This seems a bit odd since I would imagine the target demographic is youngish professionals in the technology industries however the learned lemur_catta tells me that even among educated Indians a good astrological fit is required for a marriage to go ahead.

Up next, amazon.com offers bulk lots of sacrificial chickens?

Comments

[lemur-catta.livejournal.com]

'sometimes' required, and it's often the parents who insist so I don't really know what the case would be amongst young educated professionals left to themselves.

[rahael.livejournal.com]

Well, I had my horoscope cast at birth! It's a much more complex thing than Western astrology (especially the kind you see in the papers), and it changes throughout your life - when people make important decisions sometimes, they consult the astrologer.

Belief is such a funny thing. "Belief" in astrology in the subcontinent runs quite strong in lots of places. Even if you don't "believe" it. It's part of the cultural landscape. It's a part the actual, and cultural "language".

During one of the pro-democracy marches, way back when, (before I was born), the young men who were taking part ran around my town shouting "bring out your daughters, the ones who were born under the unlucky star - we'll marry them!".

I would say, that like religious faith, the belief in astrology is simply another way of viewing your world. Kind of like providential and fatalistic thinking in the West.

Frex people who suddenly got shocked that a rapist would win the lottery. Why were they suprised? Did they imagine some benevolent force guiding the lottery numbers to the deserving?

Underneath it all, a lot of people have ways of seeing the universe working that aren't really quite "rational", and which under closer examination they don't subscribe to entirely. How this is expressed depends on the cultural contexts.

When in my family we say "that's just my bad luck", it relates tangentially to the idea that somehow a capricious and unfair universe is out there, and that relates to a world view that includes astrology.

Hope this makes sense.

Education ain't got anything to do with it. My father's farming family, with not much education voted communist all their lives, and had a world view that was essentially secular-buddhist. My mother's educated family had their horoscopes done at crucial turning points.