Ashtakoot Guna Milan is the eight-point compatibility scoring that North Indian families use to decide whether two horoscopes should result in a wedding. It compares two birth charts and returns a number out of 36. Eighteen and up is a match; below that, the usual response is to find someone else. Here it is applied, without the consent of any party involved, to every sitting legislator in three houses: the 18th Lok Sabha, the 119th US Congress, and the 2024 UK Commons.

The premise is silly. The astronomy is not. Moon positions are real, the nakshatras are where they're meant to be, and the rules come verbatim from a book your grandmother may own.

What the eight koots check

• Varna 1 pt — a caste hierarchy assigned by moon sign. The groom is not supposed to rank below the bride.
• Vashya 2 pts — who can tame whom. Humans, quadrupeds, wild animals, water creatures, insects. Yes, your horoscope might be an insect.
• Tara 3 pts — count the nakshatras between the two moons, then count them the other way. Some counts are lucky. Some very much aren't.
• Yoni 4 pts — every nakshatra has an animal. This koot asks whether those two animals would, in the wild, eat each other.
• Graha Maitri 5 pts — friendship between the planets that rule each moon sign. The planets, like everyone else, have opinions about one another.
• Gana 6 pts — gods, humans, demons. Gods and demons don't get along.
• Bhakoot 7 pts — angular distance between the two moon signs. 2-12, 6-8, and opposite are the three arrangements the tradition calls bad news.
• Nadi 8 pts — three constitutional channels, roughly Ayurvedic. Same channel is the classic dealbreaker; even a good total score can't save it. This is Nadi dosha, and it is the line at which your family calls a pandit.

The math

Moon positions are computed from scratch with a truncated Chapront-Touzé lunar series (Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, Ch. 47), with Lahiri ayanamsa for the tropical-to-sidereal conversion. Accuracy is better than 0.01° of ecliptic longitude, which is negligible next to the 3°20' width of a nakshatra pada; in plainer words, the Moon is in the right compartment. Scoring is ported directly from the rules in B.V. Raman's Hindu Predictive Astrology. No AI, no fuzzing, no fudging.

Birth data

Dates of birth are public. Times of birth mostly aren't, because heads of state do not file birth times on Wikipedia. Every legislator here is computed for 12:00 local time. The Moon moves roughly 13° per day, which is about one nakshatra per day, so a noon chart lands the Moon in the correct nakshatra on almost every day that isn't a boundary crossing. On a boundary day, the person is genuinely a coin flip and the tradition would agree. Rosters come from Wikipedia list articles for the 18th Lok Sabha, the 119th US Congress, and the 2024 UK general election, with missing DOBs backfilled via Wikidata and Wikipedia infobox microformats.

Coverage

 

Code

Python for the astronomy and the scrapers; the Ashtakoot scorer is ported to JavaScript so every pair in a 500-person house is computed on demand in your browser. Nothing is pre-matched. Everything is static, served from GitHub Pages, and will cheerfully keep telling you whether the Speaker of the House and the Chief Whip would have a good marriage.