Indian calendars more accurate

Rakesh Ranjan | New Delhi

Weather changes on Holi eve

As the festival of Holi is set to colour the people with joy and the bliss of nature, the festival has, as always, marked the end of the winter’s chill. The festival is determined, according to the Hindu calendar, more accurately than the English calendar, wherein “the festivals and seasons are arbitrarily fixed”. As the astrologers point out, the Hindu calendar or the Vikram Samvat are more accurate in determination of the Indian festivals, as it follows the annual weather cycle and the periodical movement of the Sun and Moon.

As experts say, the Indian calendar is ingeniously based on both the Sun and Moon and it uses a solar year but divides it into 12 lunar months. A lunar month has 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 3 seconds. Twelve such months constitute a lunar year of 354 days, 8 hours, 48 minutes and 36 seconds. On the other hand, the Western calendar is based on the Sun, in which a year is the time required for the Earth to complete one revolution around the Sun. This precisely measures 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds. This, according to the Indian or the Hindu calendar, led to the occurrence of the Holi festival ten days in advance as compared to the previous year when Holi was celebrated on March 11. Notably the Holi will be celebrated on March 1 (Monday) this year.

Astrologer and spiritual counsellor Bharat Bhushan Padmadeo said that the Indian calendar has an appropriate rhyme with the nature. “The Indian calendar is based on the distance between the Sun and Moon and the periodical movement of the planets. It is also based on the annual weather cycle that matches with the festivals,” Padmadeo said.

He, however, said that unlike the Indian calendar, the seasons and the festivals in the English calendar are arbitrarily fixed. The Hindu calendar on the other hand corresponds to the seasons. At the same time the seasonal influence lead to the determination of weather condition.

Padmadeo further informed that the zodiacs keep on shifting in the Indian calendar and hence occurrence of the seasons and the festivals depends on the position of the zodiacs. “Zodiac is the ring of constellations that lines the ecliptic, which is the apparent path of the Sun across the sky over the course of a year,” he said and added that the Moon and the planets also lie within the ecliptic that determine the occurrence of months and seasons. In the Indian calendar, seasons follow the Sun, months follow Moon, and days, both the Sun and Moon, he added.

Another astrologer Vijay Pathak said that the Hindu calendar determines the seasons and festivals more accurately than the western calendar. Pathak said that since the Indian calendar follows the annual weather cycle, it has six seasons in the year, unlike the English calendar, which sees only three seasons. “There are six seasons in Indian calendar — Basant, Grishma, Varsha, Sharad, Hemant and Shishir,” he said, adding that Basant season marks the beginning of the Hindu year. Pathak, however, said that the change in weather conditions during a given time in the year depends on the seasonal influence. 

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Daily Pioneer | Indian Calendars More accurate