My Perspective

This article is regarding the concept of Adhikamasa and Kshayamasa (intercalary months) used in some luni-solar calendars in India. Luni-solar calendars are in vogue since lunar months determine the high and low tides while the solar year determines the seasons. But the use of  luni-solar calendars create a unique problem. Since the lunar year (12 lunar months) lags behind the solar year (~365.25 days), this creates a need to keep the lunar year and the solar year in synchrony. Hence the need to use Adhika masa (extra month) and Kshaya masa (removed month)!  The reason for their asynchrony is explained next.

Do you want to know How to calculate the day of any given date off hand? Then read on.. For any given date, there is a simple workable formula to calculate the corresponding day. Since for most of the times we would work with dates in 20th and 21st century, So let me just limit myself to explain a simple formula that would work for these 200 years! Method : Given any date between 1900 to 2099, to calculate the corresponding day off the hand, we need to extract the following numbers. Legend: DD - day in the month MM - month CC - century YY - year in the century LY - no. of leap years past since beginning of century Given Date: DD MM CCYY LY - YY / 4 (last 2 digits of the year divided by 4) -> Quotient only Y - YY mod 7 (last 2 digits of the year's remainder with 7) L - LY mod 7 (no. of leap years in this century -> remainder with 7) M - value in the string ( 033 614 625 035 ) corresponding to month D - DD mod 7 (day in the month remainder with 7) C - 0 if CC = 20th century; ...

How are Days of the week named? Continuing with the last post of why there are 7 days in a week, here I will try to elucidate the idea behind the naming and the order of the days in a week. This was the method used in the olden times (Babylonian civilization) to arrive at the names for the days and their order.

Many civilizations and religions have the concept of 7 days making a week. Is there any astronomical significance for this (7 days in a week)? How come all civilizations chose exactly to have 7 days in a week? I had asked the very same question to