Dr. Rajkumar

Dr. Rajkumar was the central figure of Kannada cinema for decades and was once kidnapped by a bandit, which the record keeps and which is the rarer biographical fact on this site by some distance.

He was born in the Kingdom of Mysore on 24 April 1929, under British rule, with the Sun, Mercury and Jupiter grouped in Taurus and not one planet in air. Taurus accumulates and holds; no air at all means nothing in the chart steps back to comment on what is being held. That is a combination built for becoming an institution rather than a commentator, and for a man who was the industry he worked in rather than a figure within it, it is the right shape.

The chart carries two grand trines, both of them involving Saturn and Neptune. A grand trine is three planets in easy contact the whole way round: ability that arrives without resistance, with the standing warning that nothing in it compels the person to work. Having two, both built on discipline and image, describes a public presence that was effortless and durable at once. His Moon is in Scorpio, which feels everything and shows almost none of it, so the private register was the opposite of the public one.

The Sun makes a creative angle to Pluto three quarters of a degree off, which is a self with concentrated force behind it used as skill. For an actor abducted and released, who then went back to work, that is not a bad reading.

He died at Bengaluru on 12 April 2006, at seventy six, twelve days before his birthday, on a gibbous Moon 98% lit that was not finished refining anything. Saturn stood square the Sun he was born under, and Pluto made an easy angle to his Venus. The planet of cost on the identity, and the planet of force on the planet of what he was loved for.