Dear Sri Yamaka,
Let me address your concerns about vedic astrology wrt your wife's relative.
But first let me say something about Sri Sangom Ji's post wrt to myself. I do not predict for my close family. Close family means my immediate family, that includes my wife, my children. my grand children, my brother and sister and my mother. I use their horoscopes and events in their life as a teaching tool. There is a reason for this. If my grand parents are living, and they are not, I would have included them in the above group.
However I freely predict for relatives not mentioned above, and friends and acquaintances referred to me by my family and relatives and friends. In my life time, I must have made perhaps more than 1000 seminal predictions, and to my astonishment, probably about 70% of them have come true. I can not explain why, based on any scientific basis.
Now coming back to your issue. Astrology is more like medicine than any other science. In that respect, it is more of an art than science. It is because, there are myriads of variables, and each variable has differing strength and influence on the prediction - same as diagnosis in medicine, given various symptoms. Wrong diagnosis are made all the time. Do you then reject medicine as a valid discipline?
I do not predict matching, precisely because I do not trust the matching criteria and the numerical points assigned to it. The part of matching horoscopes is completely avoided by me, because of my firm belief that humans can not overcome their assigned Karma in this life. Plus, I do not agree with the scales of importance and assigned numerical strengths to the matching process, because they have been changing over time.
Despite the matching, which does not look at individual dasa balas, one can very easily see the effects on one's married life. In other words, one can look at matching criteria and approve a union, but the individual horoscopes may tell a different story and I believe in the latter.
So, my question is to you is this: Would you say that 3 doctors that diagnosed a person with one decease and the patient dies, and you condemn modern medicine?
This is exactly what you are doing with astrology, especially because you deem it unworthy of scientific inquiry.
I agree with Sri Sangom Ji's take on this.
Regards,
KRS