During the festival season, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal shared a post on X asking why and how a couple of festivals fall on fixed dates while others change as per its occurence in the Hindu calendar.
He pointed out that major celebrations like Diwali are determined using the Hindu calendar and Panchang, which makes it never fall on the same date every year. On this note, he inquisitively questioned why harvest festivals like Lohri and Pongal occur every year on the same dates, i.e. mid January.
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Aggarwal wrote, “Wondering why the festivals of Lohri, Pongal and Sankranti are fixed dates on the Gregorian calendar whereas almost all other Indian festivals like Diwali, Holi, Janamashtmi etc are on the traditional calendar”.
Not AI, netizens reply
It was learned that he initially reached out to AI for an answer, but it couldn’t provide him with a convincing reply. “Asked AI but not clear if that answer is correct. Any thoughts?”, he wrote asking netizens to help him understand the festivities in a better way.
As he resorted to netizens for knowing why Lohri, Pongal, and Makar Sankranti fall on fixed dates every year, mostly being January 14 and 15, they came forward to comment and explain to him the required. People mentioned about the lunar calendar in Hinduism and the significance of the sun in the harvest festivals.
“Pongal, Lohri and Sankranti are solar transition events while other festivals are lunar calendar based . Gregorian calendar is solar calendar. Hence these festivals have fixed Gregorian date”, one replied to Aggarwal’s post.
“Sankrant is based on suns movement into a new sign. Sun roughly moves 1 degree a day (360 degrees ~365 days). Hence the days are largely stable”, added another.
