The Cowherd

We think analytics is a modern science. Is it really? Many millennia ago, our ancient rishis correlated the events in peoples’ lives to the positions of stars (astrology), the patterns of palm lines (Palmology), the names (Numerology) and many more natural phenomena. Incredibly, these pseudo-sciences have survived thousands of years. Had they been not accurate, they would have long been forgotten. They work, more or less! The precision of the predictions are a matter of discussion, but by and large, the masses have accredited these futurological sciences with glory and their priceless faith!

The sages, in those days, have thoroughly studied the patterns in human behavior. With their extra sensory powers, which we call siddhi, they could identify the obvious as well as the subtle behavioral similarities among people, group them and finally correlate it to a natural phenomenon as mentioned above. How did they figure out the correlation? Nobody knows. But, can these correlations be used to derive useful insights for the future? Obviously yes!

Even in the modern world, decision making is not so easy. Companies spend millions of dollars every year to get insights into the future, so that they can be better planned and well prepared, to meet the future. Companies analyze the huge amounts of business data using sophisticated software, find patterns in the data and understand the reasons why things happened the way they did. All these insights are presented in the form of dashboards, a graphical display of the data.

Are not our horoscopes dashboards too? I consider them as world’s first dashboards. By looking at a set of twelve boxes and a few letters jumbled here and there, the astrologers are able to tell the past and foretell the future to a great degree of accuracy. Sans SAS, sans SQL, sans HADOOP, PYTHON, TERADATA, R and EXCEL, our forefathers figured out much more things which we are unable to, with all these software luxuries. A confluence of this ancient shastra with the ultra-modern big data analytics will therefore yield results which we even can’t imagine now.