Raj Kapoor

Water takes six of his ten planets, fire three and earth one, which leaves air empty, so this is a chart that registers and commits with almost nothing to arrange any of it or hold it still. The record calls Kapoor an Indian actor and director whose films were enormously popular in the Soviet Union.

Only one contact in this chart sits inside a degree, which makes it a loose chart by the standards of this project, and that contact is the Sun in easy contact with Neptune at just under half a degree. The reading is imagination available at no cost: creative facility, and a natural, undramatic kind of empathy. In a record whose subject is films that travelled a great deal further than anybody planned for, having the planet of image on easy terms with identity as the only tight thing in the chart is about as neat as this project gets.

The Sun sits at twenty two degrees of Sagittarius, which measures a thing by how far it got from where it started, with Jupiter on the last degree of the same sign. Venus sits at twenty one degrees of Scorpio with Saturn at ten, and Mars and Uranus both sit in Pisces. His Moon stood at twenty four degrees of Cancer at noon, close enough to Leo that it may have crossed. Mercury sits directly opposite Pluto at just over a degree, thought turning compulsive. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. For a director whose films travelled to another country entirely, a Sun in the sign of distance is the placement the record itself points at.

He died at New Delhi on 2 June 1988, at sixty three. Pluto stood conjunct his natal Saturn at nine hundredths of a degree that day, the closest thing in that sky. Jupiter rules his Sagittarius Sun, and three separate bodies sat on that natal Jupiter: Uranus conjunct it at seven tenths of a degree, Venus directly opposite at nine tenths and Saturn conjunct it from a degree and a half further out. The Moon was full and ninety six per cent lit, a phase that sees a thing clearly and usually through other people.