Makes life easy

Source: World Sikh News, Pub­lished 2 years ago – IR­WIN PREET SINGH

WSN pre­sents the rev­o­lu­tion­ary Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar App which plugs all Bikrami gaps and does away with clut­ter and cal­en­dar er­rors. Read­ers are in­vited to down­load the app, lead their per­sonal, so­cial and re­li­gious lives ac­cord­ingly.

Put­ting to rest all con­tro­ver­sies, prob­lems of ever-chang­ing dates as per the Bikrami cal­en­dars, the all-new Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar app, pro­vides with­out any anom­alies what­so­ever, the Sikh Al­manac right up to the year 9999 CE. The app is a cul­mi­na­tion of the process of the Sikhs hav­ing their own cal­en­dar with uni­ver­sal ap­pli­ca­tion started by Pal Singh Pure­wal in 1999, the ac­cu­racy of which is be­yond every shade of doubt pro­vided one sees it with rea­son, logic and an open mind. This new tech­nol­ogy tool pro­vides the plat­form for Sikhs to over­ride the wrong and base­less de­ci­sions of their com­mu­nity re­li­gious lead­ers.

There is only one Sikh Cal­en­dar that is ac­cu­rate, main­tains an­nual con­sis­tency of Gur­ban­i’s both Bareh Maha, and Rutti-Sloks.  For those in­ter­ested to read more about this, there are many good ar­ti­cles1. It is im­por­tant to fa­mil­iarise with the sum­mary of pri­mary dif­fer­ences2  be­tween the [Mool] Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar and Bikrami Cal­en­dars.

The “Mool” pre­fix, lit­er­ally mean­ing “orig­i­nal”, strictly de­fines that in The Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar 100% of the dates are syn­chro­nized with the Trop­i­cal cal­en­dar, and none fol­low Bikrami (so­lar or lu­nar) method­ol­ogy to cal­cu­late vary­ing dates over short and long pe­ri­ods. The clos­est cal­en­dar ad­her­ing to this de­f­i­n­i­tion that was ever re­leased by SGPC, was the one that com­mem­o­rated 300th year of Khal­sa’s Saa­jna in 1999. Gur­purab dates from which are re­pro­duced be­low:

Dates Guru Sahib

Thus, 1999 is con­sid­ered the adop­tion year for the Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar.  

Any later mod­i­fi­ca­tions to the orig­i­nal pu­rity or in­tent of this cal­en­dar can to­day be con­sid­ered un­grounded, shal­low, and pretty much non-aca­d­e­mic and non-con­form­ing to the prin­ci­ples of the Gur­bani. Upon adop­tion, each and every day in a year (from first of Chet to the last day of Phag­gan) was es­sen­tially adopted in this new Sikh Trop­i­cal cal­en­dar. All his­tor­i­cal Bikrami so­lar event dates are there­fore di­rectly pre­served un­der the orig­i­nal so­lar date name, yet syn­chro­nized with the Trop­i­cal cal­en­dar. This mon­u­men­tal out­put af­ter long re­search by Pal Singh Pure­wal will only be more ap­pre­ci­ated as time goes by.

Next, we’ll see how, with­out a handy cal­en­dar ref­er­ence, it is dif­fi­cult to de­ter­mine cor­rect dates for a com­mon per­son. For in­stance, if this ar­ti­cle is be­ing read on Mon­day, Jan­u­ary 1st 2018 (CE), then we also know that the same phys­i­cal Mon­day can also be ref­er­enced as De­cem­ber 19th 2017 in the Ju­lian cal­en­dar. It just hap­pens that CE, or Gre­go­rian, cal­en­dar is more com­monly used to­day. How­ever, Ju­lian cal­en­dar is still used in some east­ern or­tho­dox sec­tions of Chris­tian­ity. Con­se­quently, ad­her­ents of Ju­lian cal­en­dar to­day cel­e­brate Christ­mas on Ju­lian De­cem­ber 25th (Jan­u­ary 7th in the Com­mon Era cal­en­dar, which will shift to Jan­u­ary 8th in year 2101 CE).

A sim­i­lar, and even more pro­found, re­cent is­sue can be il­lus­trated in the con­text of Sha­heedi (mar­tyr­dom) of el­der and younger Sahibzadas, along with Mata Gu­jri ji. Their re­spec­tive Sha­heedi days are com­monly ac­cepted to be 8-Poh and 13-Poh. Now let’s ex­am­ine when they ac­tu­ally oc­curred in 2017 un­der rel­e­vant cal­en­dar vari­a­tions. See the table be­low

In-depth ex­am­i­na­tion of how vary­ing Bikrami San­graands pro­duce above re­sults is be­yond the scope of this ar­ti­cle, but a trea­tise in Gur­mukhi can be read here3. Also, high-level as­tro­nom­i­cal con­stants that are the un­der­pin­nings of these vari­a­tions can be com­pared with a trop­i­cal year length to ver­ify the re­sults. Na­ture’s Trop­i­cal year length4, T, is 365.24219 days per year.

Any year length not match­ing with T above will drift away from sea­sons at the lag rate given by equa­tion:

Lag = 1/(​x-T)

Where x is any ref­er­ence cal­en­dar length value A through E be­low:

Just as how sci­en­tific com­mu­nity has been ad­just­ing our time keep­ing with leap-sec­onds5, it is not a ques­tion of if, but when, in fu­ture cen­turies a leap-day ad­just­ment would be made to cor­rect for Trop­i­cal cal­en­dar’s 1/​2 – day drift. Thus, a trop­i­cal cal­en­dar is ex­pected to be al­ways in sync with the sea­sons. Which in turn means that the Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar would al­ways be in sync with sea­sons as well dur­ing the en­tire fu­ture of hu­man­ity – on earth or in col­o­nized space!Ex­am­ple, for Bikrami (Drik Ganit) the Lag = 1/(​365.2563 – 365.24219) = 70.87 (years to drift by a day).

For im­me­di­ate pur­pose, though, the Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar App (for An­droid6and i-OS7 mo­bile plat­forms) thus is in­dis­pens­able to cut through the clut­ter of in­for­ma­tion. Much of the con­fu­sion with dates can thus be avoided with all the in­for­ma­tion avail­able on fin­ger tips.

This mul­ti­lin­gual app (Eng­lish, Gur­mukhi, De­v­na­gri, with Shah­mukhi in-de­vel­op­ment) goes up to year 9,999 CE. The pur­pose to be able ex­plore sev­eral hu­man life-spans in fu­ture is to demon­strate how this cal­en­dar is al­ways in sync with sea­sons over thou­sands of years. A Bikrami cal­en­dar cov­er­ing this much time-span will im­me­di­ately high­light the prob­lem of drift­ing sea­sons.

With the il­lus­tra­tion of the de­fault home-screen be­low, var­i­ous fea­tures and nav­i­ga­tional tips are listed as fol­lows:

Mool Nanakshahi aap

1) Menu -> Lan­guage, se­lects de­sired lan­guage

2) Menu -> Home, re­turns to to­day’s date

3) Menu -> Events, lists all events by month

4) Other Menu se­lec­tions are self-ex­plana­tory

5) Search event with a key­word in the se­lected lan­guage. Ex­am­ple, when the lan­guage is Eng­lish then “Parkaash” search will list all birth­day Gur­purabs.

6) Play but­ton plays Bareh-maha au­dio of the se­lected (high­lighted date’s) month

7) Color coded dates for shared desi months in cor­re­spond­ing CE month

8) Ad­vance, and re­verse, by cen­tury or 1000-year ar­rows

9) Click on year to se­lect a year within a cen­tury. Dates and months are se­lec­table as in­di­cated

10) Stars on dates in­di­cate pres­ence of cor­re­spond­ing his­tor­i­cal event

Nanakshahi calendar app_inner

11) Any dis­played date can be clicked to se­lect to be able to see quick con­ver­sion

A de­scrip­tion of the Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar would not be com­plete with­out high­light­ing the ex­am­ples of in-depth his­tor­i­cal re­search by Pal Singh Pure­wal, namely:

  1. Guru Nanak Sahib’s Gur­purab8 date9 of 1-Vaisaakh (April-14th)
  2. Band­hee Shorrd Di­vas10 date of 1-Phag­gan (Feb­ru­ary-12th)
  3. Hola-Muhalla date11 of 1-Chet (March-14th)

The list of Gur­d­waras and or­ga­ni­za­tions, world over, con­tin­ues to grow12 that have adopted res­o­lu­tions for com­plete adop­tion of the Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar in­clud­ing above listed im­por­tant dates.

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Foot­notes

  1. Ar­ti­cles on Gur­bani and Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar
  2. Com­par­i­son be­tween Nanakshahi and Bikrami Cal­en­dars 
  3. San­graand
  4. Trop­i­cal year
  5. Leap sec­ond
  6. Google Play: Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar
  7. iTunes: Mool Nanakshahi Cal­en­dar App
  8. Prakash Date Guru Nanak Sahib
  9. Guru Nanak Sahib prakash date
  10. Band­hee Shorrd Di­vas
  11. SGPC Jantri 1999-2000
  12. List of Gur­d­waras for 5 Jan Gur­purab