INDIA: Astrologers are honing their star-gazing and fortune-telling skills while wrestlers are limbering up to help India's politicians decide their fate in the forthcoming general elections.
"The astrologers will manage the heavens and the wrestlers the voters," a senior outgoing MP jocularly remarked, without wanting to be identified.
Over the years both have become a fixture in India's election scene, he added.
Scores of mendicants and yogis, or religious men, known for "delivering" electoral successes, are busy "organising" the stars for candidates from all parties trying desperately to win elections, staggered voting for which begins on April 20th and ends three weeks later.
The outgoing Hindu nationalist-led 24-party coalition will clash with the main Opposition Congress Party for control of the 545-member parliament.
Several powerful regional parties also feature prominently in the polls.
"The greater the uncertainty, the more the need for astrologers as guides into the unknown," said Pankaj Khanna, an astrologer who has ably "steered" senior MPs through the complex maze of Indian politics and elections.
Senior politicians, he said, were flocking to him wanting to determine the exact time of filing their nominations, beginning their campaigns and, above all, pleasing the "appropriate" gods.
Irrespective of their political affiliations, there are few Indian politicians without a string of astrologers, palmists, numerologists or occultists on their payroll, dominating every public and private move.
Whether they believe everything their astrologers tell them is another matter. But as a senior government MP from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led federal coalition said, there was no "celestial" advice he would forego. It just might work, he added hopefully.
Political parties are also hiring wrestlers and body-builders to provide security for candidates, "capture" polling booths to enable their patrons to vote for themselves, and in some cases to intimidate rivals.