S. S. Rajamouli

S. S. Rajamouli directed Baahubali and RRR, films built at a scale Indian cinema had not previously attempted for an international audience, and his chart contains more unresolved tension than anybody else in these sixty summaries.

He was born at Manvi on 10 October 1973 with three separate yods. A yod is two planets in easy contact both pulling awkwardly at a third, with no comfortable resolution anywhere in it, and three of them in one chart is genuinely uncommon. All three involve Neptune, the planet of image and of what cannot be made definite, and two of them involve Saturn, which is structure and cost. Tension between the imagined thing and the buildable thing, three times over, with no way to settle it internally, is as close as a chart comes to describing a director of spectacle.

Saturn squares Pluto four minutes of arc from exact, the tightest aspect he has. Structure against force: the immovable against the irresistible, which in a working life reads as somebody who takes on projects that should not be possible and does not treat that as a reason to stop. Air holds four of his planets against one in earth, so the chart conceives far more readily than it consolidates, which is a dangerous balance in anybody who has to deliver a film on a budget and an exhilarating one in anybody who gets to decide what the film is.

The Sun, Uranus and Pluto group together in Libra, the sign of other people and of how a thing is received. Having identity, disruption and pressure in there belongs to somebody whose work is aimed at an audience as a single body rather than at individuals, and whose idea of a successful film is a room reacting at the same moment.

Three yods is a chart that will never feel finished. The films are what that looks like when somebody has a budget.