“They have been forcing marriage upon me and astrology is something they look at every single day,” says Aksheyaa, 24. Her experience is not unique many women reported feeling pressurized to get married at a certain age, to a certain person, without any regard for their actual desires, due to an astrologer’s verdict. “Astrology has created so much chaos in my extended family, such as getting 19 year-olds married to 33 year-olds,” says Aparna, 23. As a result, it risks normalizing a rhetoric that many in India have been trying hard to fight. But this makes it sound benign and rootless when it isn’t. The idea is not to take it too seriously. Indeed, it arguably has very little to do with belief. Byte-sized with its own nomenclature, rules, and inner circle jokes, it is everywhere whether one believes in it or not. The internet’s “pop” astrology and memes are devoid of contextualization or nuance. But in India, young people taking to it - whether ironically or not - replicates a generational pattern that is problematic at best, dangerous at worst. Where newspaper columns and magazines once carried similar tips, tricks, and advice, the phenomenon has now moved online and become a major GenZ subculture. You wouldn’t need to scour the internet for too long to come across memes about earth or wind signs and the kind of month they’re having, how they behave in various situations, and how they would react to, say, a minor inconvenience or a major catastrophe.
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