Science of Fortune

Some books entertain their readers. Some enlighten them. A few educate, and fewer still elevate. Science of Fortune was written to do all four, and it has been doing so, without a single advertisement, since 1954.

Its Tamil original, Adhista Vingyanam, was printed in 1954 and reprinted twenty-six times before 2013 — carried entirely by readers pressing it into the hands of other readers. The English edition, translated and expanded by the author's son and disciple V. S. Guruswamy, appeared in 2003 and has since passed its fifteenth edition.

The work rests on something unusual for its genre: evidence. Pandit Sethuraman analysed the lives of hundreds of soldiers in his wartime unit — their promotions, their reversals, their deaths — and found a pattern that corresponded to their dates of birth and to the letters of their names. Everything in this book descends from that observation.

It is also the first work in the history of the predictive sciences to give readings beyond the number 52 and up to 108, drawn from the scriptural and spiritual sources in the author's own library. Nobody had done it before. Most books published since have quietly borrowed from it.