First a quick recap of the events: We had reported on one Mr. Bhaskar Shetty who hit the headlines of DNA’s Bangalore edition on the 23^rd of December, 2009. He had promised to teach me a lesson by demonstrating how scientific asstrology is! He had claimed that he could tell the gender and dead/alive status of 10 individuals within 80% accuracy, using just the date, place and time of birth of the individuals. However, he wanted the conditions to be fool-proof. He was also not interested in the money offered- one million rupees, but only wanted to prove how scientific his method was. I had agreed to an even more fool-proof method of giving him the date, time and place of birth of people who were very much alive and also in the age group 20-30. I just wanted him to tell us if the subjects were male/female, employed/unemployed, married/unmarried and what their educational qualifications were. All of these could have been easily verified from the subjects after the predictions were made, since their mobile numbers would have been placed in sealed and numbered envelopes. The reply from Bhaskar Shetty was that he was willing, but he was insistent that the challenge had to take place in Bangalore. Since, he did not want the prize money, I had waived off the security deposit and had fixed the date at Bangaluru on the 14^th of January,2010. After this Shetty got out of the challenge under the pretext that his son’s marriage was to take place in the first week of February. So, I had extended the date by 2 months and had fixed the challenge date for  the 14^th of March, and had announced the venue and time. Read the full story

This is the story of N.K. Singh, Senior lecturer, National Institute of Visually Handicapped School, Dehradun. While most of those who lose their eye-sight blame it as a curse for the sins committed in their previous birth and spend this life singing praises of god so that they could be normal in their next, the attitude of N.K. Singh is totally different and praise worthy. He lost his eyesight due to conjunctivitis when he was a toddler. His father tried his best to get him treated. The treatment was to collect seven types of stones from different roads and throw them into a well after waving them around the child’s head. The higher level of treatment was repeating the same with seven different flowers! When wisdom finally dawned upon the father he took him to a eye hospital at Aligarh where some medicine was prescribed but not purchased because he could not afford the six rupees needed! After all that when the child was finally taken for proper treatment to Delhi, it was too late as the optic nerves had atrophied. Read the full story

We have reported on many of the past challenges issued by rationalists to purveyors of supernatural beliefs. The challenger in many of these cases (1,2,3,4,5), Mr Narendra Nayak, president of the Federation of Rationalist Associations of India, has a long-standing challenge issued specifically for astrologers. Here it is in his own words:

“We shall provide the date, time and place of birth of 10 individuals along with the appropriate solutions. The challenger can cast the horoscope and state the following within 90% limits of accuracy- is the individual male or female, dead or alive. ” Read the full story

These challenges were released to the Nepal press on the occasion of a press conference at Kathmandu on the 25th of October and the same are applicable to those in India too! Read the full story