Prashna - Ask a Question

The panels above say what Prashna does and what it needs. This long read goes underneath them: where a chart for a question sits in the classical texts, how the app casts the chart of the moment, the exact rules behind each of the five question types, how to read every result the page can return, and what moves the answer. The short public description is on the Prashna Kundali calculator page; the feature itself runs inside a signed-in account.

Every chart, score and verdict quoted below came from running the code that serves the Prashna page. The sample moment is 5 October 2026, 10:00 IST, at New Delhi coordinates (28.6139 N, 77.2090 E); it is nobody's question. The frequency figures come from running the same code on every twentieth minute of 2026 at those coordinates - 26,280 moments - and describe the rule set, not how often anything came true.

Prashna in the classical texts

Prashna means question. A Kundali is cast once for a birth and read for a life; a Prashna chart is cast for the moment a question is put and read for that question alone. The text this feature reads is the Daivajna Vallabha, a compact work on query charts in fifteen chapters. Its closing verses (Ch. 15, Sl. 41-43) name the author as Mihira - Varahamihira, son of Adityadasa, of Avanti - while its opening verse, in the translation this app works from, names Sripati with Varahamihira in brackets. Hence the wording the app uses: attributed to Varahamihira.

The opening chapter states the method in one verse (Ch. 1, Sl. 2): the astrologer who weighs the ten Avasthas - the states of the planets - together with the results arising from the houses 'never goes wrong'. Everything the engine does is one of those two things. The chapter also says how a question should be put (Sl. 9-13): with a settled mind and once only, the astrologer weighing its syllables and the omens around it. The app keeps one of those instructions - ask once. It sees no omens, performs no ceremony and does not read the words you type.

This is not the only text in the app's library that treats the moment of a question as a real chart. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra gives a chapter (Ch. 78, Lost Horoscopy) to recovering unknown birth details from the Prasna Lagna, the ascendant at the time of the query (Sl. 3-4). Saravali does the same (Ch. 48, Sl. 1; Ch. 52) and remarks, where it defines temporary friendship between planets (Ch. 4, Sl. 30), that the rule holds for a birth chart and a query chart alike. None of that reconstruction is built here - Birth time unknown: what still works explains what the app does instead - but it shows a query chart borrowing its grammar from natal astrology.

That shared grammar lets one engine serve both. Signs are movable, fixed or dual (BPHS Ch. 4, Sl. 5; Saravali Ch. 3, Sl. 20-21). Planets are natural benefics or malefics (BPHS Ch. 3, Sl. 11): the engine counts Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and the Moon as benefics and the Sun, Mars, Saturn, Rahu and Ketu as malefics. Every planet aspects the seventh place from itself, and Mars, Jupiter and Saturn carry extra aspects (BPHS Ch. 26, Sl. 2-5). Every rule below is built from those three ideas.

What a house stands for in a query

Chapter 2 lists what each house answers for when the chart belongs to a question (Sl. 4-16). A selection:

The chapter then says how to use the list (Sl. 18): treat the house that stands for the matter as the ascendant and judge from there, reading the past from the 12th house and the future from the 2nd (Sl. 19). This app does not make that rotation: all five question types are read from the query ascendant itself. The table is background for the houses named in your reasons - the natal side is covered in articles such as the 1st house, the 7th house and the 11th house - and a fair statement of what a fuller Prashna practice would consult.

Fifteen chapters, six of them read

Six chapters feed the engine and nine do not, for stated reasons. Chapters 5 and 7 are about armies. Chapters 6 and 8 tell the astrologer when to announce that an absent traveller or a patient will not survive; this app issues no such verdict about anyone, and health questions get no category. Chapter 10 names hidden objects; Chapter 13 predicts the sex of an unborn child. The same filter applies inside the chapters that are used: Chapter 9's verses describing a thief's body, sex and community are dropped, and Chapter 12's verses forecasting an early death, widowhood or misconduct for a future spouse (Sl. 5-10) are not paraphrased, softened or shown. What was taken from which book across the app is on the Sources page.

How the chart of the moment is cast

When you press Ask, the server reads its own clock as the request arrives - not when you opened the page or began typing - and passes that instant, with the latitude and longitude saved with your birth details, to the same function that builds your Kundali. The astronomy is not special to Prashna: the Sun and Moon from standard Meeus series, the five visible planets from published Keplerian elements, Rahu from the mean node of the Moon with Ketu opposite, and the Lahiri ayanamsa subtracted to give sidereal positions. Swiss Ephemeris is not used; the Methodology page states the accuracy that implies.

Houses are whole-sign: the sign rising is the 1st house, the next the 2nd, and so on, as in the Lagna calculator. Two flags are set on each planet. It is retrograde if its apparent longitude twelve hours after the moment is behind its longitude twelve hours before; the Sun and Moon never are, and Rahu and Ketu always are, by convention. It is combust if it stands within a fixed distance of the Sun - 12° for the Moon, 17° for Mars, 14° for Mercury, 11° for Jupiter, 10° for Venus and 15° for Saturn.

For the sample moment the engine returns Scorpio rising at 5.10°, in Anuradha, with the Moon in Pushya, and these nine placements.

Of all that, the page shows two points: the Query Ascendant and the Moon, each with sign and nakshatra. The planet table produces the reasons and is then discarded; a saved reading holds your question, the category, the verdict, the reason sentences, those two points and the timestamp. To see the whole chart behind a reading, the free birth chart tool runs the same function: enter the date and time shown beside Asked, as local time at your saved place, and that place. Read only its positions and houses - the dasha and personality sections describe a person born at that minute, which a query chart is not.

The ten Avasthas, and the six the engine can name

The Daivajna Vallabha lists ten planetary states (Ch. 1, Sl. 3-6) and attaches a result to most of them (Sl. 7-8). The engine applies them to one planet only - the lord of the query ascendant - and can name six.

Three details decide which name you see. Friend and enemy are the compound relation: the fixed natural table Saravali gives (Ch. 4, Sl. 28-29) combined with temporary friendship, which depends on where the two planets sit in the chart of the moment (BPHS Ch. 3, Sl. 56; Saravali Ch. 4, Sl. 30 says the rule may be applied to a horary chart too). A lord whose compound relation with the ruler of its sign comes out neutral gets no name: the engine adds nothing to the score and prints no line, which happened in 15.3% of the moments of the 2026 sweep (the named states ran Mudhitha 24.1%, Mushita 17.9%, Suptha 15.9%, Diptha 12.9%, Dina 7.5% and Swastha 6.5%; figures from the re-run of 12 October 2026 on the current engine). And combustion overrides the name but not the arithmetic: a combust lord is always labelled Mushita, yet the number added to the score is still the one for its sign. On 10 October 2026 at 00:10 IST Cancer was rising with the Moon combust in Virgo, a friendly sign; the first reason read Mushita, the friendly-sign point was still counted, and the verdict was Favourable on a score of exactly 2. When a Mushita line sits above a Favourable verdict, give the line the weight. The printed sentences are also milder than the verses: where the text says poverty or danger, the line says the matter is struggling or carries a risk of setback.

The other classical lists in this library do not match this one name for name, which is worth knowing before you compare notes with another astrologer. BPHS (Ch. 45, Sl. 7-10) gives nine states and uses Din for a planet in a neutral sign, not for debilitation, with Kop for a planet eclipsed by the Sun. Saravali (Ch. 5, Sl. 2-4) also gives nine, calls a combust planet Vikala and a planet in its fall Bhita, and has no Dina. The engine follows the Daivajna Vallabha because that is the text written for query charts. The fuller, numeric measure of planetary strength the Kundali uses is on the Shad Bala calculator; Prashna does not use it.

General yes/no: how the score is built

Chapter 15 gives the general reading: benefics make the house they occupy flourish and malefics spoil it, with exceptions. The engine reduces that chapter to one signed score, and says so in its own source comments. Each of the four benefics adds one point in any house except the 6th, where it subtracts one. Each of the five malefics adds one point in an upachaya house - the 3rd, 6th, 10th or 11th - and subtracts one anywhere else. Then the ascendant lord is weighed, more heavily than any single placement: plus two if exalted or in Moolatrikona, plus one in its own or a friendly sign, minus two in an enemy sign or debilitated, nothing if neutral. A total of 2 or more reads Favourable, -2 or less reads Testing, and -1, 0 or 1 reads Mixed signals.

The sample chart shows the arithmetic. Jupiter and the Moon in the 9th and Venus and Mercury in the 12th are four benefics outside the 6th: +4. The Sun in the 11th and Ketu in the 10th are malefics in upachaya houses: +2. Mars in the 9th, Saturn in the 5th and Rahu in the 4th are malefics elsewhere: -3. Scorpio's lord is Mars, debilitated in Cancer - the Dina state: -2. The total is +1: Mixed signals, with ten reasons listed and the Dina line first. One minute matters here. At 11:54 IST the same day Scorpio was still rising and the score was still +1. At 11:55 Sagittarius rose; its lord Jupiter is exalted (Diptha, +2), every planet moved back one house, and the score became +5: Favourable.

So a line such as 'Moon in the 8th house - classically a house benefics flourish in', which the engine printed for the noon chart that day, is the general rule speaking; the chapter's own exception points the other way. The score is one defensible summary of a chapter that argues with itself in places, not a transcription of it. In the 2026 sweep it ranged from -9 to +9, and the verdict was Favourable in 56.0% of moments, Mixed in 36.7% and Testing in 7.3%.

Money, gains and opportunity

Chapter 3 opens (Sl. 1) with the rule the engine counts: a benefic in the 11th, 7th, 5th or 3rd house produces gain, and a malefic there does not deliver the result desired. Each benefic in one of those four houses adds a point; each malefic there takes one away. The chapter closes (Sl. 5) with the rising sign: with Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius rising the person gains some position or post, which the engine counts as one more point; with a movable sign that does not happen, which takes a point away; with a dual sign the verse says both happen, and the engine prints that line and scores nothing. A total of 1 or more reads Favourable, -1 or less reads Testing, and 0 reads Mixed signals.

Five malefics can stand in those houses against four benefics, and only the four fixed signs add a point for the rising sign, so Testing is the most common answer here: the 2026 sweep returned it in 45.7% of moments, Favourable in 29.6% and Mixed in 24.7%, with scores from -5 to +4. The sample chart is a fair illustration. No benefic sits in the 3rd, 5th, 7th or 11th; the Sun in the 11th and Saturn in the 5th each take a point away; Scorpio rising adds one; the total is -1, Testing. Read which signals produced the score. A benefic in the 11th, the house the text ties to gains from trade, is a different statement from a fixed sign rising, which the verse ties to status or a post, not to money.

The rest of the chapter is not read: the second half of Sl. 1 on status and respect, the house of the Moon and the aspects on it (Sl. 2), the quick-gain pattern of Sl. 3, and the Moon and Sun placement that Sl. 4 credits to Satyacharya and Bali. For how your own chart, as opposed to the moment, reads for work and money, Career & Money starts from your natal 10th house and dates its windows from your Vimshottari timeline.

Travel

Chapter 4 decides travel first from the modality of the rising sign (Sl. 1). A movable sign - Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn - means the journey happens. A fixed sign - Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius - means no coming or going. A dual sign - Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius or Pisces - behaves like a movable sign in its first half and a fixed one in its second. The engine applies the first two as written and treats the whole of a dual sign as undecided.

Finer verses adjust the reading. With a movable sign rising, the Sun, Saturn, Mercury or Venus in the ascendant means travel comes early, unless that planet is retrograde, when the verse says there is no travel (Sl. 2). With a fixed sign rising, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus or the Sun in the ascendant means the journey is broken off (Sl. 3). One of those same four in the 11th house means setting out very soon; in the 12th, breaking the journey and returning (Sl. 4). And the text reports the view that a person away from home returns when the lord of the 7th turns retrograde (Sl. 10), which the engine prints as a note whenever that lord is retrograde at the moment of asking.

The verdict word needs translating here. Favourable means the journey is read as going ahead; Testing means not happening or cut short; Mixed signals means rules fired on both sides; No clear indication means a dual sign with nothing else counted. If you hope a trip will be cancelled, or are asking whether someone will come back, Favourable is not automatically the answer you wanted. Every rule that fires is counted, for the journey or against it, and the verdict is read from the two counts. The sample chart has Scorpio rising, a fixed sign: one against. Mercury and Venus in the 12th each add one more against; the Sun in the 11th counts one for departure soon; and Venus, lord of the 7th, is retrograde, which is printed as a timing note and counted neither way. One for, three against: Mixed signals. The same instant cast for London has Leo rising and Jupiter in the 12th with nothing in the 11th: two against, Testing.

Across 2026 the sweep gave Favourable in 28.3% of moments, Testing in 26.9%, Mixed in 23.3% and No clear indication in 21.5%. A movable sign rising read Favourable in 69% of its moments and Mixed in 31%; a fixed sign never read Favourable, because one rule against is always there, and read Mixed in 30% of its moments. Every No clear indication had a dual sign rising. Not read: Sl. 5-7, and the arithmetic for how many months until a return (Sl. 8-9), which needs a ranking of planetary strength and a navamsha.

Lost and found

From Chapter 9 the engine takes only the verses that say whether an article comes back. It counts signals for recovery: a benefic in the ascendant (Sl. 14, 16); a benefic aspecting the ascendant (Sl. 11, 16); and a benefic in each of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th and 11th houses (Sl. 12-15), one signal per house. Sl. 13 names the upachayas "(3, 6 and 11)", and Sl. 15 a benefic in the 2nd or 3rd "from the ascendant or from the 4th house" - the 5th and 6th; the engine left those two out until October 2026. It counts one signal against: the ascendant in the sign of a malefic - Aries, Leo, Scorpio, Capricorn or Aquarius - and aspected by a malefic (Sl. 16). Signals for and none against reads Favourable; the signal against and none for reads Testing; both reads Mixed signals; neither reads No clear indication.

In the sample chart Jupiter, exalted in the 9th, aspects the ascendant by its fifth-house aspect, and no malefic aspects Scorpio: Favourable. By 3:50 pm the same day Aquarius was rising with Rahu in it and Ketu opposite, which gives the line against; a benefic in the 6th gives one for, and the verdict is Mixed signals. The base rate matters: the sweep returned Favourable in 77.0% of moments and Mixed in 22.5%; No clear indication, where no rule fired at all, in 0.4%; and Testing in 7 of 26,280 moments.

Two simplifications sit inside those counts. The verses speak of a full Moon in the ascendant (Sl. 11, 13, 14) and a very strong benefic in the 11th (Sl. 11); the engine counts any Moon and any benefic, although BPHS classes a waning Moon as a malefic (Ch. 3, Sl. 11). And the verse that needs a navamsha (Sl. 17) is not read. Left out on purpose is everything that points at a person or a place: who took the article (Sl. 1-3), their appearance (Sl. 3-7), whether it was stolen, dropped or mislaid (Sl. 8), and the direction it went (Sl. 9). A chart of the moment is not evidence against anyone, and the app will not print a sentence that could be read as an accusation.

Relationship timing

This question type reads two verses of Chapter 12 and is silent far more often than it speaks. The first (Sl. 11): if the Moon is in the 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th or 11th house from the query ascendant and is aspected by Jupiter, the Sun and Mercury and by no others, the match goes ahead without delay; if it is aspected by malefics, obstacles arise. The second (Sl. 12): if a strong Venus aspects Mercury or the Moon placed in the ascendant, there is no delay; if malefics aspect, there is.

The engine checks the house of the Moon, then the planets aspecting that house. An aspect from Jupiter or Mercury with no malefic aspect counts as a signal forward; any malefic aspect counts as an obstacle. One difference from the verse needs stating plainly: the Sun is on the engine's malefic list, so a Sun aspect on the house of the Moon - which happens only when the two are in opposite signs, around full Moon - counts as an obstacle, although the verse names the Sun with Jupiter and Mercury. In the 2026 sweep that happened in 887 moments, and in 268 of them the Sun was the only planet on the malefic list involved. If your reading says the Moon is aspected by a natural malefic and the Panchang for that date shows a tithi near Purnima, the line may rest on the Sun alone.

The second verse is implemented as Venus in the 7th house - the only place from which it aspects the ascendant - and not combust, the engine's reading of 'strong', with Mercury or the Moon in the 1st. No malefic aspect on the ascendant counts forward; one counts as a delay. Only the Moon half occurs in practice, because Mercury and Venus never stand in opposite signs as seen from Earth: in the sweep the rule fired in 141 moments, every one through the Moon.

Put together, the sweep returned No clear indication in 69.9% of moments - each time with no reason at all - Testing in 25.3% and Favourable in 4.8%. The usual result is the plain statement that no classical rule in the chart pointed either way. That is the engine being accurate about how little two verses can say, not a lukewarm answer about your relationship. The sample chart is one of those: the Moon is in the 9th and Venus in the 12th. Eight days later, on 13 October 2026 at 7:40 pm IST, the Moon was in the 7th from a Taurus ascendant with the aspect of Jupiter on it and none from a malefic, and the same code returned Favourable. The category is called timing, but no date comes out of it. For what two birth charts say about a partnership, see Compatibility and the Kundli Matching calculator.

Reading a result

• The verdict word - Favourable, Testing, Mixed signals or No clear indication - is a four-value summary whose meaning depends on the question type, as the table below sets out. No percentage accompanies it, because the engine computes none: it keeps an internal score for two of the five types and returns neither to the page.
• The Query Ascendant and the Moon identify the chart. The rising sign drives most of the rules; the nakshatras are displayed and are not read by any rule.
• Why this reading lists the engine's reason sentences, each split at its dash into a placement and what is read from it. This is the working. For four of the types the lines name the chapter and sloka; general yes/no lines do not, because they come from the reduced score. The sentences are stored as the engine wrote them, in English, whichever language the app is set to.
• Past questions holds your latest twenty, newest first. Tapping one brings back its verdict, reasons and chart points exactly as saved; nothing is recomputed.

Two results deserve a note. If the reasons panel says no classical rule in the chart pointed either way, the verdict beside it will be No clear indication and it means exactly that: silence, not a balance of good and bad. Mixed signals always has at least one reason on each side. And where a verdict and its reasons seem to disagree - a Favourable on general yes/no above a Mushita line, say - the reasons are the fuller statement.

How often each verdict comes up

A verdict means more when you know how often the rule set produces it. The table is the count from the 2026 sweep at New Delhi coordinates, last re-run on 12 October 2026 on the current engine. Repeating the run at London coordinates moved no figure by as much as three percentage points.

Three things follow. A Favourable on lost and found is the expected output and carries little information by itself; a Mixed there is the more unusual reading, and on gains Testing is the commonest answer. A Testing on general yes/no is uncommon - about one moment in fourteen - because four benefics score in eleven houses each while five malefics score in only four. And relationship timing mostly declines to answer. None of this says whether the classical rules are right about the world. The Accuracy page counts three kinds of entries you log yourself - reactions to Kundali insights, ratings of Timing phases and outcomes of decisions - and Prashna verdicts are not among them, so this app holds no evidence about how often a Prashna verdict matched what happened.

What moves the answer: the minute and the place

Prashna asks for no birth time, so the usual warning about an uncertain birth time does not apply to it. Its own sensitivities are the minute you press Ask and the place the chart is cast for.

The minute

Nearly every rule above starts from the rising sign, and the rising sign changes twelve times a day. On the sample day at New Delhi coordinates the ascendant held each sign for these spans.

Within one span the houses of all nine planets stay fixed unless a planet changes sign, so a second question of the same type usually gets the same answer. Across a boundary everything shifts one house at once. Run at two-hour intervals through that day, general yes/no read Favourable at 06:00 and 08:00, Mixed at 10:00, Favourable at noon, Mixed at 14:00, Testing at 16:00, Favourable at 18:00, Mixed at 20:00 and Favourable at 22:00. This is why the instruction to ask once matters more in software than it did in person: re-asking until the word changes is always possible and tells you nothing. The server counts every ask against the allowance for the day whether or not the question is new.

The place

Classical Prashna casts the chart for where the question is put. The app has no live-location input, so it uses the coordinates saved with your birth details as a stand-in, and the Privacy page lists this as a secondary use of birth data. If you still live where you were born, nothing is lost. If you have moved, the ascendant is the one rising over your birth place, and the error grows with distance. On the sample day the rising signs at New Delhi and Mumbai coordinates differed for 215 of the 1,440 minutes; those at New Delhi and London differed for all of them. At the sample instant Delhi and Mumbai both had Scorpio rising (5.10° and 5.01°) and identical readings. London had Leo at 29.6°, which turned travel from Favourable to Testing and lost and found from Favourable to Mixed. The signs of the planets do not depend on place; only the ascendant, and therefore every house, does.

The day, and the edge of a sign

The daily allowance is counted per calendar day in UTC, so for a reader in India the count resets at 05:30 IST, not at midnight. The plan table in the code allows one ask a day on Free, five on Basic and no limit on Premium and Elite. While the app runs in its free-for-everyone mode, as it does at the time of writing, the server gives every account the top allowance, and the page prints whatever limit the server reports. As for precision, the astronomy is good to a few arcminutes for the planets and a few tenths of a degree for the Moon - ample for a sign and a nakshatra, not infallible at an edge. An ascendant or planet within a fraction of a degree of a sign boundary, like the London ascendant above, 0.4° short of Virgo, could fall on the other side in a full ephemeris, and a house with it. Why apps disagree on your nakshatra covers the same effect for birth charts.

What this Prashna does not do

• It does not rotate the chart to the house of the matter asked about (Ch. 2, Sl. 18-19). Every reading starts from the query ascendant.
• It does not use divisional positions. Navamsha, decanate, dwadasamsa and trimsamsa readings of the ascendant run through the text (Ch. 9, Sl. 1, 4, 8; Ch. 15, Sl. 11-23) and none is computed for a query chart, although the app builds them for birth charts - see the Navamsa and Drekkana calculators.
• It gives no dates. The timing methods in the text - months counted from the strongest planet (Ch. 4, Sl. 8-9), the shadow-length calculation (Ch. 14, Sl. 18-22) and the unit of time read from the navamsha lord (the closing verse of Ch. 15) - are unbuilt. A verdict says how the moment reads, not when anything happens.
• It does not score the general combinations of Chapter 2: a head-rising (Shirshodaya) sign on the ascendant (Sl. 20), benefics in angles and trines with malefics in the 3rd, 6th and 11th (Sl. 21), the 'human' signs (Sl. 24), or benefic aspects on both ascendant and Moon (Sl. 26). The first would also need a choice between sources: Saravali (Ch. 3, Sl. 24) lists Sagittarius among the signs that rise hind-part first, while the BPHS translation in this library describes it as rising with its head (Ch. 4, Sl. 17-18).
• It does not weigh the phase of the Moon or the company Mercury keeps; both always count as benefics. Nor does it build the other four Avasthas, which need planetary war and divisional strength.
• It does not derive an ascendant from the first letter of the question when the time is unknown (Ch. 14, Sl. 29-32). The letter classes in that passage did not survive transcription in the copy this app works from, and a guessed table would be worse than none.
• It does not read the lord of the hour of the question (Ch. 15, Sl. 33), although the cycle that verse gives - Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars - is the one the Hora calculator lists for any date.
• It does not read your question, and it prescribes nothing. The category selects the rule set; the text is stored for you and never parsed. No remedy, ritual, gemstone or donation follows from any verdict, and no reading is a guarantee.

Where Prashna sits beside the rest of the app

Prashna is the one part of this app that ignores who you are. Everything else begins from your birth: the Kundali reads the chart of that moment for life; Timing dates your Vimshottari periods from your birth Moon (what a Mahadasha is); the daily dashboard and the Gochar calculator read the planets of today against your natal chart. Prashna reads the planets of today against the ascendant of today, and two people asking in the same minute with the same saved place get the same reading.

Three neighbours answer adjacent questions. Muhurat runs in the opposite direction: it looks ahead for a window to act in, whereas Prashna reads the time you happened to ask at and cannot be steered. If the question is when, Muhurat or Timing is the tool, and the Panchang, Choghadiya and Rahu Kaal calculators describe any day without an account. Decisions answers should-I questions from your own chart - your running Mahadasha and the strength of the relevant house lord - with YES, WAIT or NO and a score out of 100. It is the natal counterpart of a general yes/no Prashna, and the two can disagree because they read different charts. And the AI chat assembles its replies from your saved chart, dasha and numbers: a question typed there is answered from your birth data, not from a chart of the moment.

When Prashna and your natal reading disagree, that is information, not an error to resolve. The text itself, in a chapter this app does not otherwise use, says other things may be considered with reference to the natal horoscope (Ch. 7, Sl. 29). A sensible order is the natal picture first, the dated periods second, and the question of the moment last - one more signal, with a known and rather generous base rate.

Do I need to know my birth time to use Prashna?

No. The chart is cast for the moment you ask, so no birth time enters the calculation. It does need the latitude and longitude saved with your birth details, because the ascendant depends on place. The natal pages you might read alongside it still depend on birth time; Birth time unknown: what still works says which.

I asked the same question twice and got two different verdicts. Which one counts?

The first. The rising sign changes about every two hours, and on the sample day a general yes/no question went from Mixed to Favourable between 11:54 and 11:55 IST because Sagittarius replaced Scorpio on the horizon. The text says a query should be put once only (Ch. 1, Sl. 9-10). A second ask reads a different moment; it does not correct the first.

Why does my money question so often come back as Testing?

Because the rules subtract as readily as they add. A benefic in the 3rd, 5th, 7th or 11th house and a fixed sign rising each add a point; a malefic in one of those houses and a movable sign rising each take one away, and there are five malefics against four benefics. In 2026 Testing was the answer in 45.7% of moments. Look at which lines produced the score rather than at the word alone.

I live in a different city from where I was born. Is the chart cast for where I am now?

No. There is no current-location input, so the chart is cast for the coordinates saved with your birth details. Between nearby cities the rising sign is usually the same - New Delhi and Mumbai agreed for 1,225 of the 1,440 minutes of the sample day - but between distant ones it usually is not. The Privacy page describes this as an approximation, and it is one.

Does the wording of my question change the answer?

No. The engine receives the moment, the saved coordinates and the category you chose. The text is stored exactly as typed, up to 300 characters, and plays no part in the calculation. What does matter is the category: the same moment can read Favourable for lost and found and Testing for travel, because each uses a different chapter.

Is a Prashna verdict a prediction?

It is a classical reading of one moment by a small, stated set of rules. It carries no probability, no date and no guarantee, and the app keeps no record of whether any verdict matched what later happened. Use it as one signal beside your own judgement, and give the reasons more weight than the word above them.

Can I ask about an illness, or whether someone will recover?

There is no category for it, on purpose. The chapters of the text on disease and on people who are away (Ch. 8 and Ch. 6) work by announcing recovery or death, and this app does not make that kind of statement about anyone. Nothing in Prashna is medical advice; a health question belongs with a doctor.

Who can see my questions, and can I delete them?

They are saved to your account, word for word. The page shows the latest twenty; older ones stay stored. There is no control for deleting a single question today. Deleting your account in Settings removes every Prashna question along with the rest of your data, as the DPDP page sets out.