For Kanika Kohli
जन्मदिन की हार्दिक शुभकामनाएँ · janmadina kī hārdik śubhakāmnāẽ — heartfelt wishes on your birthday.
Some people you meet in a classroom and then simply keep. Kanika and I met through our Jyotish class, and she has been a steadily good influence in my life ever since. Today is her birthday — and for a change, I made her a newspaper.
THE KANIKA TIMES · special birthday edition · Astrology 101 Press
The headline is a joke, but it is also just the news. Kanika moved from corporate life into leadership coaching — helping people navigate organisations, careers, and mostly themselves. What strikes me about her is not the transition; plenty of people change jobs. It is that she is genuinely curious about helping people. Not curious in the way that makes for good small talk — curious in the way that makes someone ask you the second question, and then wait for the answer.
She is also a devoted Krishna bhakt, and holds the whole thing together without any apparent strain: leadership, spirituality and Jyotish in one working model, plus a non-negotiable commitment to a proper North Indian adrak chai. The chai should ideally arrive with snacks. I did not invent this detail; I have simply observed it enough times to consider it settled science.
And here is the part I am most grateful for. Every one of our astrology study trips through Tamil Nadu — the long temple days, the early starts, the questions that only make sense once you are standing in front of the thing — she has been a constant companion on all of them. Study is one thing on a screen and another thing entirely in a corridor of carved stone at seven in the morning. Having someone reliably there for that is not a small gift.
One of the temple mornings · Tamil Nadu
A correction has since been issued
Journalism is a discipline of humility, and The Kanika Times ran its first correction within a day of its first edition. The headache protocol, it turns out, does not involve Coca-Cola at all. It is Thums Up — ice cold, preferably in a glass. The record is now set straight, and the Astrology 101 Emergency Response Team has been re-briefed.
THE KANIKA TIMES · correction & clarification · 26 August 2026
Getting the small thing right, the very next day, without being asked — that is precisely the quality that makes someone worth having in the room when the questions get bigger.
So the wish is simple and I mean all three words of it: health, wealth and happiness — always. Kanika, you make the people around you think a little more clearly, including me. Thank you for being a friend of this house.
Her birthday falls on a day whose yoga is literally named longevity
I did not arrange any of this — the panchāṅga did. Today is Maṅgalavāra, Tuesday, the day of मङ्गल Maṅgala — Mars: energy, courage, the will to actually begin. It is also Hanumān's day, which is a fair patron for anyone whose work is helping other people find their strength.
The Moon spends the day in Uttara Āṣāḍhā, ruled by the Sun — the nakshatra of later victory, the win that endures rather than the one that flares. It carries the old epithet apar-ājita: unconquered. Of all the twenty-seven lodgings the Moon could have chosen for the birthday of someone who left one career to build a truer one, it picked the one that means the victory that lasts.
And the yoga running through the day is Āyuṣmān — which translates, with no help from me, as long-lived. On a birthday. The traditional Sanskrit blessing for a birthday is दीर्घायुष्मान् भव, dīrghāyuṣmān bhava — may you be long-lived. Today the sky says it before anyone else gets the chance.
The tithi is Śukla Dvādaśī, of the Bhadrā family — the group the texts mark for well-being and for work that serves others. Which is, more or less, her job description.
And the number: the 25th reduces, in Ank Jyotish, to 2 + 5 = 7 — the number of Ketu, the seeker: inward-turning, unsatisfied by the surface of things, forever asking what is actually going on here. Her own newspaper calls her leader, seeker, coach, bhakt. The arithmetic had already agreed.
दीर्घायुष्मान् भव
May you be long-lived, ever well, and surrounded by the people who matter most — with health, wealth and happiness, always.
Happy birthday, Kanika. 🙏