Man, this whole thing started because of my Uncle Raj. We were sitting around last Diwali, and he kept going on and on about how 2015 was the “year of prophecy” for Virgos, specifically how this one Hindi YouTuber absolutely nailed everything about his career shift. I just snorted. Astrology? Come on. But Raj, he’s persistent. He actually bet me fifty bucks I couldn’t systematically review and disprove the specific monthly predictions from that year, the ones delivered in Hindi by this particular astrologer. Fifty bucks is fifty bucks, but really, it was the challenge that grabbed me. I had to go find that ancient history and pull it apart piece by piece.
The Painful Digging for Digital Relics
The first step was just finding the source material. We were talking 2015 YouTube videos in a specific regional language. That’s like digging up digital relics from the ancient internet. I fired up the browser and immediately started trawling through old, low-res channels and forgotten astrology sites. I couldn’t just search “Virgo 2015,” because that gives you a million current videos. I had to nail down the specific astrologer Raj was talking about—a guy named Shastriji. It took me three evenings just to finally locate his old, abandoned YouTube channel. Thankfully, the videos were still there, monthly uploads from January to December 2015, all dusty and pixelated, sitting on some corner of the server.
Then the real trouble began. These weren’t text articles I could just copy and paste. They were 15-minute monologues, delivered fast, conversational, and totally in Hindi. I don’t speak Hindi well enough to take complex notes while listening to rapid-fire astrological jargon and spiritual advice. The thought of manually transcribing twelve hours of content made my head spin.
Building a System for Abstract Claims
I decided to get tactical. I grabbed a simple open-source transcription tool I had lying around—nothing fancy, just a basic speech-to-text script I sometimes use for local recordings. I fed the videos into the tool one by one. Predictably, the output was a mess. It butchered the names, the dates, and definitely the technical astrological terms. But it gave me a starting point. I had to manually sift through those eleven months of text, correcting keywords and breaking the flowery, verbose predictions down into clear, actionable bullet points.
My goal wasn’t to argue the celestial mechanics. My goal was documentation: did he make vague predictions, or specific, testable claims? I created a massive spreadsheet. I organized every prediction Shastriji made for Virgos in 2015, totaling over 150 unique items, into five main categories. This allowed me to quantify the fuzziness:
- Financials: These were the easiest to verify. (“A minor windfall in the second half of the month.”)
- Career/Employment: (“Significant tension with a superior figure.”)
- Health/Wellbeing: (“Pay attention to digestive issues in late spring.”)
- Relationships/Family: (“Unexpected good news from an elder relative.”)
- General Life Vibe: (The vague stuff, like “You will feel renewed energy.”)
I processed everything this way. It felt less like spiritual research and more like intense financial auditing. I was tagging everything: Vague, Specific, Positive, Negative. I even developed a rough ‘Vagueness Score’ based on how often he used hedging words like ‘maybe,’ ‘potential,’ or ‘could be in the future.’ The transcription and data entry sucked up nearly two weeks of my evenings, but I finally had the whole year archived, translated, and structured.
The Final Confrontation (With Data)
Once the data was clean, I sat down with Raj. This was the fun part. I projected the spreadsheet onto the wall and we walked through the year, month by month, comparing Shastriji’s claims to Raj’s actual life events in 2015. Raj was initially insistent that the February career prediction—a major upheaval that forced a change of department—was spot on. He recalled it instantly.
But then I countered. Raj had completely forgotten about the claim Shastriji made for May: a ‘major financial loss’ and ‘strained family ties.’ Raj definitely didn’t experience a major financial loss—unless he counts that time he lost his expensive sunglasses on holiday—and family relations were solid that month. Raj only remembered the handful of hits, completely filtering out the dozens of misses and the hundreds of vague sentences.
I showed Raj the final tally, the sheer volume of filler content versus the few relevant points. I pointed out that Shastriji pumped out so many predictions across so many life areas that statistically, some of them were bound to touch on something real. Of the 150+ items I logged, about 80% were too vague to be meaningful, and the remaining 20% were split almost evenly between correct and incorrect when held up to Raj’s actual 2015 timeline. The guy was just throwing spaghetti at the wall and waiting for something to stick.
Raj admitted it was less prophetic than he remembered, but he still didn’t pay me the fifty bucks. He just laughed and said I wasted too much time proving something everyone already knew. But honestly, I loved the process. I ripped apart old media, built a reliable structure around abstract claims, and turned a superstitious belief into a messy, complicated data project. I learned exactly how much technical effort it takes to review a complete year of archived, specific-language content. And that knowledge, that ability to structure chaos, is worth more than fifty bucks… probably.
