A different way to think about birth charts, mantra, and what gets passed from one life to the next.
In many Indian families, a child's birth chart is drawn up soon after birth, and the parents read it as a forecast — will this child have a good life? where are the hard patches? what remedies should be done if the outlook is poor?
I don't think that's the right way to use it. Two people born with almost the same chart can live completely different lives — twins are the obvious case — so the chart can't be fixing the future. I'd read it backward instead: not as a forecast of what's coming, but as a record of what a person arrived with, the tendencies they brought into this life.
And I'd go one step further. It may not be that one whole, finished person is brought into a life at all, but a collection — several streams of consciousness and tendency, fused into a single being. The chart doesn't name a soul; it specifies which tendencies were fused together and which ones dominate the new composition. And that composition isn't fixed: practice, mantra above all, can shape it — strongly before birth, and a little across a lifetime.
This is the short version. The full argument — the karmic streams, the gestational field, why mantra works, and how it reads the tradition's own texts — is in the paper: "The Chart as Specification: A Compositional Account of the Jiva, the Gestational Field, and the Mechanism of Mantra".