Today is Gudi Padwa, spring festival, time to celebrate as this is first day of the Chaitra month as per Vikram Samvat, the Indian calendar, heralding the new year. It also marks the beginning of the Nav-Ratri festivities where Divine Mother is worshipped, the devout observe fasts and rest of us feast. The North Indians , by and large avoid non-vegetarian food and liquor, which itself is a penance for them and will match upto any kind of fasting in terms of sacrifice. True to form there are messages galore on what’s app with good wishes on this auspicious occasion.
While good wishes are always welcome, there were quite a few who were celebrating this as the Hindu New Year, which caught my attention. We don’t wish people on 1st Jan for a Christian New Year or an Islamic New Year as per the Hijri calendar. Is time as a dimension different for different religious beliefs?
We divided time into hours, minutes, seconds, months, years, then lunar/solar calendars were designed to keep track of the time, but irrespective of the system, the rotation of the Earth around the Sun and its revolution on its axis remains sacrosanct. You may start your count from any particular point and will eventually return to the same point exactly 365 days and a quarter of a day later. So whether it is 1st Jan or Gudi Padwa or Navroz, or for that matter any other random day, each day is the first day of a New Year in its own right. Just that globally the Gregorian calendar finds greater acceptance. Why did 1st Jan find more acceptance as the global new year, well that is obviously due to the colonialism that we all suffered in the era gone by. Since they were the lord and masters, time too had to be measured and kept account of in their own system. Gradually the rest of the world just followed suite more for convenience than for any scientific reason.
It is also universally acknowledged that the Indian Calendar or ‘Panchang’, as it is known is a lunisolar calendar, meaning it takes into account the movements of both the sun and the moon. Indian astronomers refer to the time-space dimension as “Kala” a single entity, interconnected, which is what Einstein went on to prove much later in the early twentieth century. Incidentally the traditional Chinese calendar too follows the lunisolar system
Anyway the aim is not to stir any hornet’s nest, suffice to say that the New Year is fine but let us not divide it into our religious beliefs. We all will continue to follow the Gregorian calendar for all practical purposes. Greetings for Gudi Padwa and a Happy New Year friends not just a Hindu New Year.