Dr. B.V. Raman was another important figure guiding me on the Vedic path. He is best known as modern India’s greatest astrologer. For sixty years up to his death in 1998 he was the leader of the Vedic astrology movement in India, through his popular Astrological Magazine and his many in-depth  books on the subject. Most notably, Dr. Raman presented Vedic astrology in an English idiom that  made it accessible both to the English educated elite of India and to foreign audiences. I came across his books in the early seventies but would only come to meet him in India many years later. I eventually took a special initiation with him for the purposes of learning astrology.

Dr. Raman has given a well-documented set of political predictions over the years, like the rise and fall of Hitler, or the resignation of Richard Nixson, forecasting these events well in advance of their actual occurrence. No other astrologer of the century, East or West, has equaled his record. Yet Dr. Raman was far more than an astrologer. He was a statesman and a thinker, a modern sage with a cosmic vision based   upon a deep Vedic perspective. He was a great defender of Vedic values and causes, challenging modern distortions, Eurocentric biases and scientific dogma with clarity, consistency and determination.