Re: cursing absolutely. Anyone presenting you with the option upfront, do this or get cursed, can get shown two fingers. Curse me, I'll curse you. Suggestibility, I feel people are as they are and do as they do, suggestions that take root, if they do, are matched to the soil. Your reading will have been both, because what is intuited is the person's modes and make-up, just as weather forecasts are far from being predictions, being predicated on observed patterns, while still suspectible to the interjection of 'random' Factor X. I had my first ever Tarot reading at 18, a boy at school. He forecast a long range problem, a serious illness and eventual recovery. It meant nothing to me, I couldn't encompass that possibility; in my young, strong arrogance it didn't worry me. I suddenly remembered it 20 years later and thought to myself, goodness me, he was a natural, no handbook, and there's no one spread, anyway could indicate a thing like that. There was someone with a prodigious intuitive talent without the maturity yet, how could he have had, to excercise judgment in the expression of his talent. One does not hand out dooms, not only for the reasons you mention, which are very great reasons, but it is hubris on the part of the reader.
Never been to India. A friend went recently and reported what you describe in your novel, baksheesh constantly in your face, a hand, beseeching rarely more than 2 feet away. I went to the USSR once when it was still the USSR. 1981. Leningrad as still was, Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand, Moscow. Thomson tour! We were asked for things there too, politely, proudly, biros and chewing gum.