Calendar of events - ...anyone has one?

Jay Radhe!

We're heading to Braj for a month or so, beginning early March. Would anyone have a calendar of noteworthy events at hand? I do know the date for Gaura Purnima, but more specifically I'm looking for times and places of festivals etc. in and around Vrindavan to visit.

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So, at least we have Holi and Gaura Purnima...

Holi Pastimes

Take along some old clothes and do Holi in Varshana. OR, go to a Manipuri temple in Vrindavan. Special events.

The difficulty of doing a calendar in the Western hemisphere, is that the tithis (lunar days) do not always coincide with the calendar dates given in the panjikas printed in India.  You really need to calculate precisely for whatever longitiude you are at to get the right date for say example an Ekadasi or Mahadvadasi, otherwise you could very well be doing the observance on the wrong day.  Without going into all of the mathematics and astronomy involved (which requires all kinds of trigonometry, etc.).  There are now software packages available that will give the lunar day start and end times for a given location on the globe, but then you still need to apply the rules for determining when the Mahadvadasi comes into play rather than the Ekadasi (these are laid down in Hari-Bhakti-Vilasa).  I could produce in software form (possibly on this website) a calendar that you could call up by plugging in your longitude and latitude, but I would need some funding to get that underway, as it is a considerable effort and I do not personally have the resources to make it happen, although I have the jyotish expertise to do it.  This could also be a duplication of effort, because there may already be something out there, I am just now currently aware of any such resource.

Anyways, who is going to be minding the store in your absence (while you are in India), or will the website be on autopilot?

Do you know of the Vcal Vaishnava Calendar utility? It is available for download at:

http://www.iskcon.com/Resourc....dar.htm

It looks like a handy utility, I've used it since some time.



The only thing I can imagine which would need my active attention is if the bulletin board was invaded by anti-raganuga terrorists who pasted in every possible text they could imagine against the raganuga-tradition.

Having this in mind, I'll hand over the Super Administrator login and password to any one or two senior persons here. Super Admin means you can delete and/or edit anything, plus you have full control over banning IPs, IP groups and email addresses. The Super Admin can also see the IPs based on service provider and check NIC WhoIs directly from the board, and if there is a persistent anti-raganuga wallah, report his service provider of the client's "repeated and persistent religious hate activities" which will get him cut off entirely from his internet connection. It takes about two minutes to do this.

In regards to the store, if you mean the bookstore, it mails to both myself and Advaitadas, so we'll have an outage of one week in early March in responding to book orders, since we're out of office at the same time then. I think people will handle this.

Plus, I'll be logging in now and then from Braj to check that everything is together. I can do full remote administration from anywhere (provided the internet connection is decent). So there should be no problem. Let me know if there are any concerns.

Thanks for the link for the calendar program.  I ran one for a local calendar here in the U.S. and compared it with one for Vrindavan, and it appears to be right (some dates are different and others are the same - some overlap is to be expected).  However, it is a DOS based program, which means it targets a long obsolete platform.  A web based utility would be an improvement, as well as a Windows app.  Microsoft's new .NET platform would be ideal for development.