Building a year planner from a panchang, the gist

Building a year planner from a panchang

A family's whole year of fasts, festivals and lunar birthdays can be copied out of the Indian almanac onto a single sheet of paper in one afternoon, if you take the dates in order of what it would cost to get them wrong, and leave the daily warning windows off the paper.

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

The dates on that sheet are worth different amounts. Miss a festival and you have missed it for a year. Miss a fast that comes round twice a month and it is back in a fortnight. Sorting by that one question decides everything about how the afternoon goes.

Indian households keep dates a wall calendar does not print: fasts counted by the moon, birthdays counted by the moon, the yearly remembrance of a parent, the few festivals a house actually cooks for. All of them are in the panchang, the printed Indian almanac. This is a method for getting the ones your family uses onto one sheet in an afternoon.

Work in order of what a mistake would cost. First, the five or six dates that need leave from work, a train ticket or an invitation, because noticing those two weeks late costs money. Second, the dates nobody prints for you: a birthday kept by the lunar day somebody was born on, the yearly rite for a parent, one person's private fast. These have to be looked up one at a time, with whoever remembers them nearby.

There is a trick to that second step. Do not hunt for last year's date. Ask instead for the name: the month, the fortnight and the number. A name is fixed for life, and turning a name into a date takes two minutes in any app. Keep the names on a card, separate from the sheet.

The big festivals come next and go fast, since every calendar in the country prints them. The repeating fasts come last, in a thin column, because they are the most numerous and the least costly to get wrong.

Then three checks. Was the almanac computed for your own city, since the day starts at sunrise and sunrise is local? If your household keeps ekadashi, which of the two dates some months print is yours, and stay on that line all year. And never build this year's sheet from last year's: lunar dates fall about 11 days earlier each year, and a year with an added month sends them nearly three weeks later instead.

Last, what to leave out. The daily windows people are told to avoid are cut fresh each morning from that day's daylight, so a time written on a wall in July is wrong by August. They are not dates.

Words decoded

panchang (पञ्चाङ्ग): the printed Indian almanac, giving the day's lunar and star reckonings for one named city
tithi (तिथि): a lunar day, measured by the widening gap between the moon and the sun rather than by the clock
janma tithi (जन्म तिथि): the lunar day somebody was born under, kept as the birthday in many families
shraddha (श्राद्ध): the yearly rite for a parent or grandparent, fixed by a lunar day
ekadashi (एकादशी): the eleventh lunar day of a fortnight, kept as a fast in a great many households
fortnight, bright and dark: the two halves of a lunar month, one while the moon fills and one while it empties
Bhadrapada: one of the twelve lunar month names, falling in August or September
adhika masa (अधिक मास): the extra lunar month added about every third year to keep the lunar and solar years together
rahu kaal (राहु काल): one eighth of a day's daylight, picked by weekday, in which new things are conventionally not begun
muhurta (मुहूर्त): a window of time, a fifteenth of the daylight on an almanac sheet, some of which are marked as poor
gazetted holiday: a public holiday an office closes for, as against a restricted one an employee chooses

Why anyone should careIn most families the calendar lives in one person's head, and every year somebody telephones to ask when the fast falls. An afternoon settles that for good. It also puts a quiet decision in front of the household, because a sheet that lists when things happen is read a few times a month, and a sheet that also lists what to avoid is read every morning, and those are not the same object.

Read it properly, 8 min Building a year planner from a panchang