Milkha Singh

Of his ten planets, five sit in water signs, three in fire, and one each in earth and air. Water registers a thing before deciding anything about it, and the element that would hold a fixed position is nearly absent, which is not the chart anybody would predict for a sprinter. Singh was called the Flying Sikh, and the record says he narrowly missed an Olympic medal.

The Sun, Mercury and Venus sit across nineteen degrees of Scorpio, three planets in the sign that commits totally and explains nothing, and the Moon answers from Cancer. Both are water signs, so the whole personal half of this chart runs on what it registers. Saturn sits on the final degree of Sagittarius. For a runner whose record is defined by a race he came fourth in, a chart with no earth to steady it and everything in water is a hard reading to sit with.

The Sun stands at a strained angle to the Moon at two fifths of a degree, identity pressed against private feeling, and Mercury stands at the same angle to Uranus at just over half. Venus is held at an awkward angle to that same Uranus at nine tenths. Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets at his birth, and nothing here forms a named pattern. In a sprinter, identity pressed against private feeling is a hard arrangement to carry into a race he came fourth in.

He died at Chandigarh on 18 June 2021, at ninety one. Pluto rules his Scorpio Sun, and that day it made easy contact with that Sun at just over a degree while Venus sat conjunct his natal Pluto at under a third. Neptune made easy contact with his natal Mercury at a tenth of a degree, the closest thing in that sky, and Saturn did the same with his natal Jupiter at a sixth. The Moon was at its first quarter and half lit, the phase that acts decisively, and the Sun had reached Gemini, air, against his natal water.