H.A.F. Song, Davila Reese. We're going to be talking all about Hindu calendars, how they're set, how festivals. are determined, the dates of them, and all sorts of things like that. I have to confess this is one of those areas of Hindu Dharma traditions that not running a temple myself, living in the United States, I haven't actually gone into that much. So if I'm coming off sounding like I don't know as much as I normally might on these shows, I'm guilty as charged. So let's jump into that.
Hindu calendar, or should we be saying calendars, plural, lunar, solar? What do we got going on? Give everyone an overview of how Hindus have told time. Okay, well, thanks for having me on. So, yes, Hindu calendars, plural, is definitely correct. There are more than 30 different well-developed and very distinct calendars in use across India. A couple more in the Hindu world if you extend all the way over to Indonesia. The diversity of them, it's...
Regional and seasonal. Each regional people had their own calendar tied to the local rhythms of Mother Nature, unlike the way that we've gotten used to our calendar working in the West, which was set up. more arbitrarily for the convenience of standardizing administrative purposes. The traditional Hindu calendars were more Working with the local nuances of nature, making the people who habitually use those calendars sensitive to nature, the rhythms of the seasons, and so on. Lunar solar.
Technically, most of the Hindu calendars are lunisolar. One word, lunisolar. They are both lunar and solar. They have a solar year. tied to the solar year, and they also have lunar months tied to the lunar cycles. rather than just being certain numbers of days that divide neatly into the solar year.
In order to reconcile that, since, of course, the year does not evenly, perfectly divide neatly into lunar cycles, the way that the hindu calendars work instead of the familiar gregorian uh leap day added once every four years approximately The Hindu approach, traditionally, is to precisely maintain the lengths of the months with the cycle of full moon to full moon or new moon to new moon, but rather to occasionally add an entire leap month.
about what it comes out to to make the math work is about nine leap months every 17 years. So every two or three years, usually, you'll have a leap month called Adhikamasa, or that varies in different Indian languages. But that's basically a high-level overview. I could go through what all of the different Hindu calendars are or all the major ones, but basically we're talking about About 31-ish different Hindu calendars.
Most of the major festivals are common across almost all of them. They're not radically different from each other. A couple of them, however, are purely solar rather than lunar. So there is some variation depending on what regions of what regional traditions you're getting into.
Okay, let's hold on the regions for a second because 31 calendars is a lot. Yeah, we won't go through all 31. We don't have to go through all 31, but we'll get into maybe some of those. The most common, perhaps. Let's start off with the... What was it how many? months that reconcile the cycles with the seasons. How many did you say? Nine every...
17 years or 17 every 9 years or am I already gone? Yes. Usually the way the Hindu astronomers traditionally do the calculations so that the math works out. What it comes to is there are about nine leap months every 17 years. So most people don't have one, but every two or three years.
There'll usually be an extra month in order to make sure that the lunar months don't get too far off. If you're building a calendar base around the seasons and recognizing those, you're eventually going to find summer in the wrong month.
or what the ever equivalent part of the season is so when are they actually added in the calendar obviously most listeners will know we have a leap day in February so in the middle of winter and one day isn't that big of a deal but if we have an entire month Where are those traditionally dropped into things, or does that too vary? There's some variation. Like, for example, the next one coming up, there isn't one in 2025.
But there will be one in 2026, and it'll be in May, June. That's a pretty typical time. Okay, so approximately when we're recording this a month from now, according to the Hindu calendar, we'll have a... a correction okay um let's let's go into those rituals so how How do different regions of India do things? I mean, because I know
And most listeners will probably know the seasons in India don't correspond with the seasons in North America or Europe for that matter. So let's... unpack that for me a little bit and how do the seasons actually play into if it does? the away calendars and the months are traditionally described food all of that yeah so traditionally in india they talk about six seasons instead of what's familiar in the west which is four
It varies, again, depending on what region you're in. Of course, the seasons high up in the Himalayas are not the same as the seasons down in Kerala. And obviously in some places like Kashmir, they're actually closer too. western one and that you have a strong winter when we have a winter and then summer corresponds but yes of course um but so mostly they have uh So there's lunar months, 12 usually, 13 if there's a leap month that year.
And the Hindu calendars, the lunastolar calendars, which are most of them. The way that they define them relative to seasons varies regionally because of how much the weather differs depending on where it's getting warm for spring. is going to be at a different time depending on where you are in India. So almost every language group and state in India will tend to do that part a little differently. But broadly, the most commonly used calendars
In ancient times, the one that was the most widespread across most Hindu Dharma traditions was the Kali Yuga calendar. That would be the most universal one, which started... Counting the years in 3102 BCE, so by the Kalioka calendar, it is currently year 5127. About 2,000 years ago, coincidentally not... super far off from the Gregorian year, which also started roughly, well, retroactively, because it replaced the Julian calendar, but the dates are, again, 2000-ish.
India began using two different calendars which became very popular. One is called the Vikram Samva. I won't go through all the different regional colonies, but there's two that the majority of Indians use. So I'll mention these two. This one is used all through northern, central India, and Nepal. so it's got a 12-month lunar calendar so the average year will be 354 days and so they correct that
with the solar year by adding leap months when needed. According to the Vikram Samvat, they started that one in 57 BCE, so by Vikram Samvat, right now it's 2082. Unless you are Gujarati, because they count it one year off. According to Gujaratis, it's 2081. The other one is called the Shalibahana Shaka calendar. This one is used in... South India, not the furthest south. Not Kerala, not Tamil Nadu, but the Deccan region. So Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Goa.
This one uses their new year is solar rather than lunar. They calculate it based on the spring equinox, but they have lunar months. This one they started, or they didn't start it, but they re-standardized it and recalibrated the year to year zero in 78 CE. So, Shaka Calendar, it's 1947 as of this interview. um this one also is widely used throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia by Buddhists as well as Hindus. So those are the two that are very widespread. And the Tamils have their own going on.
The Malayalis in Kerala have their own going on. Those two are solar calendars with much less going on with the moon. But the two that most Hindus use, the Vikram Samvat and the Shalivahana Shaka, are lunasolar calendars. Here's a bit of a curveball question. We all disclosure, we went over what we're going to talk about before this. And forgive me if I go off script already, only two questions in. How are those Hindus, those of us in the West, How do you think this actually?
Does this actually apply to us? What can we get from knowing this information? and in our lives, other than using traditional names for the months and understanding how some festivals are set. Spoiler, we'll get to that. But how does this play and how does this work for you? How do you apply these in your life? Yeah, fair question. So first, speaking broadly rather than myself personally, it depends on, the most important way is it depends on if you're following a specific dharma tradition.
If you're just kind of generally a Hindu in the West, then... I think that there is some applicability. And if you have basic familiarity with one of the most common Hindu calendars, either Vikram Samvat or the Sharivah Hanashaka would make sense. Uh, since those are the ones that most endos use. I think that to have a basic understanding of them gives insight into how Hindus traditionally conceived of their relationship with time and the year and the cycle of the seasons.
They're especially into the significance of the lunar phases because most Hindu festivals are set according to the full moon and the dark moon or new moon. that Hindus were very aware of this, and every Hindu always knew. You'd never catch a Hindu who didn't know whether the moon was currently waxing or waning.
Everything was determined by that. There were certain ceremonies they performed every full moon, every new moon, things they would do differently depending on whether it was waxing or waning. They were just more plugged in on an everyday basis to the rhythms of nature. And I think there's a value in being aware of that. Whether or not you do it in the same way that they did, I think that there's a value in having that kind of awareness of nature, whereas the average non-Hindu...
American, or even some Hindus, if you just kind of pop quiz on the street, is the moon waxing or waning right now, or when is the next full moon, I bet a lot of people would have no idea if they didn't look it up. If you are following a specific Hindu Dharma tradition, like say you are a Gaudiya Vaishnava, then this matters a lot. You have a lot of specific festivals to your tradition that are set.
in great detail by one particular of these calendars. And so if you're following that tradition, now you might just look up your local temple's calendar, you might not need to do the calculations yourself, but if you're doing... Fasting days at home on egg odysseys. Or if you are doing them on trail dashes in different traditions or so on, then you need to know what day you're supposed to fast on if you are following one of those specific traditions.
The way that I do this personally, I follow smart dharma according to my own personal guru's tradition. So there are certain festivals I observe, devotional festivals. for my certain fasting days, etc. So I do closely follow certain dates on the calendar.
So whether or not you choose a specific calendar to follow or just have a general awareness of the cycle of nature, I think that being plugged into natural rhythms to some degree is a pretty important part of... integrating a traditionally dharmic awareness and worldview into your lifestyle there's a i i think there's a benefit there in feeling connected to the cycles of nature and not just
getting caught up in modernity where your computer tells you what Gregorian date it is and you're not plugged into what's going on in the sky and with the rhythms of Earth around you. Sorry, I spaced out there thinking about the last time I added all the moon cycles to my calendar, and I pay a lot of attention to that because I find it useful for so many things. One thing before going to festival. How does the use of the Gregorian calendar for our non-Indian listeners, people who haven't
I have no knowledge of India, which I imagine is all 10 people, but let's do it anyway. How does the Western calendar figure in a nation like India where these other calendars are? are present and used by people and corollary to that subsequent question. We're talking about something that has continued on here through the colonial period after and as a Western calendar was imposed. Is that correct? Yes. So the official modern Indian national calendar.
was a set by the modern nation, the Republic of India. It combined many of these traditional calendars into one official standardized calendar for government purposes, since, you know, if you're running a national government, You need to know what date it is and it's going to be a problem if half the country disagrees with you. So they set a standardized one which is used in modern India. The old ones remain in use among people for festivals and for traditional cultural observances.
So pretty much everyone in India, basically everyone in India, knows what Gregorian day it is. They're familiar with that. They know that it is April 18th or whatever. But when it comes to their festivals, their cultural stuff, they will use the traditional calendar of their particular region and or dharma tradition. Also, farmers will more often use the traditional dates. Basically, they're like farmer almanacs in terms of the traditional calendars have.
planting days and harvest date built into them and so especially if you're in the agriculture sector in India those are still very much used so we've mentioned it five times already festivals Let's go into how those are set because I know at HAF we have an entire guide to this that lists out the days according to Gregorian calendar. They vary every year. unless you know the reason behind it, you don't know why it's doing that. Unpack that for people, please. Че? So most of them vary every year.
A few of them don't. A few of them are set according to a solar date, and so they're going to be the same Gregorian date almost every year. Once in a while, there might be one day off. Those are mostly the Sankranti festivals, Vaisakhi, Pongal. There's a few. The vast majority of them... swing pretty widely every year, up to kind of a month and a half-ish. And in terms of the total range that they move in by the Gregorian calendar, that's because they are set not by the sun.
But by the moon, all of those Hindu and not only Hindu, but also Buddhist and Jain festivals. are determined relative to a certain full moon or a certain new moon. So they're either on the titty, and I'll explain what a titty is, but they're either on the titty of the full moon or the new moon or a certain number of titties after it. And what a titi is,
In the Hindu calendars, there's two types of day. There's a solar day and there's a lunar day. A solar day is called a solar day, which means a solar day starts when the sun rises. And when the next sunrise comes, that's the next Sora de Vasa. That's not what these festivals are set according to. They're set according to the Titi. A Titi... is 1 30th of a lunar month. And specifically the definition, this is a Vedic day, the Vedic definition of a day on the calendar.
The technical definition of it is the time required by the relative motions of the sun and the moon and the sky. to become so sometimes the sun and the moon are getting closer together from our visual perspective sometimes they're getting further apart The Hindus divided this into the arc of the zodiac in the sky, which is a circle of 360 degrees. if the sun and the moon get 12 degrees closer together or 12 degrees further apart That is one titi, the time it took for them to do that.
And technically, because the lunar motion around the Earth is not exactly even with the Earth's motion around the Sun, the length of a titty varies slightly. The shortest titty will be 21.5 hours, the longest titty will be 26 hours. but there's always 30 of them between a full moon and the next full moon or between a new moon and the next new moon and so it's according to the titis that most of the festivals are set that'll be like on for example uh means on the 14th day counting after
The new moon, if it is some calendars, the Amanta calendars count the month starting from the new moon. The Purnimanta calendars count it starting from the full moon. So it depends on which Dharma tradition you're following. This is also what sometimes people will... raise points of confusion of it says this festival is supposed to be on the full moon but if you look up when the moon is actually the most full in the sky it's
then it's a day off or something. I confess, listeners, I think he's saying this because I brought this up in one of our internal conversations because we'll get to this, like, how you look up things and Google will tell you one thing. Traditional endocallenders are like, oh, no, no, no.
It is something different. Yes. That is because Google will tell you, when does the moon look the most full in the sky? But that's not technically what Hindu calendars mean by... That's not what they go by. They don't go by... when the sun and the moon rise relative to our horizon, they go by how close the sun and the moon are to each other in the arc of the zodiac.
And sometimes that math works out differently also because since a titi, unlike a solar day, one titi might change into another titi in the middle of the afternoon. And that calculation becomes unwieldy. So what Hindus traditionally do is say, whenever the sun rises, whatever tithi it is at that time, we're going to say that the rest of that day is that tithi. But some traditions instead go by sunset.
And so on. So it depends on which specific dharma tradition you're following. They each have their own rules. Each one of them is extremely clear on how they do it. but it's not entirely standardized. So it depends on which dharma tradition you're following, which rules you follow in order to derive the festival, which means that sometimes... Smartas will do a festival on one day, but Vaishnavas will do the same festival the day before or the day after because they're using...
Slightly different rules to calculate what day they should observe the festival on. Complicating that. I know from the temple that I go to most frequently. Sometimes, at least, there will be a puja on Monday. to following the traditional calendar, but because the holiday falls not on a weekend to get people to come sometimes
the sort of more communal part of it. They'll have a different celebration for the same holiday just to accommodate people because most people in the West aren't ready to drop everything to go. to a Hindu festival on a Wednesday necessarily. For sure, that's very common. So is there anything that you've mentioned many times and driven it into us that there's a lot of variability going on here? Is there anything for the listener that wants sort of the top level?
reading of that to say there are different categories, you know, without going into all the details that calculate things differently or I don't know how to phrase that exactly. Do you see what I'm saying? It's like, we've got 31 different calendars. If you don't want to get into the weeds, is there some simple thing you can go by?
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, HAF makes that pretty conveniently available, top level. We have our Tarmic Days calendar, which just gives you a date. Of course, that's assuming you're in America. We're calculating the dates for in the continental U.S.
for most people. Certain traditions will vary from that. If you're following one of those traditions, then presumably your tradition is giving you the calendar you should be following. But just for general Hindus, for easy to pick up and use we've made one available The other website, which is the gold standard that Hindus all over the world use and should use, it is absolutely the gold standard for making all the calculations available.
is Drek Panchan, which I'm sure we'll get into. Yeah, let's do it and spell that out for people. If anybody's following along at home, let's open this one up. Drek Panchan. D-R-I-K. d-a-n-c-h-a-n-g dot com Okay. So I've got this open here. And I imagine many of you are right, this is totally the gold standard. And I have used this site many times, but what I'm going to do right now, I hope you can walk me through.
is I've used this just to know that top line date, but then this sort of thing gives you so much more information. So walk me through something here. So I have one eighth of the knowledge that you're presenting right now. Yeah, sure. So, for example, you can go to directpunchung.com slash calendars. That will give you all of the different... It will give you the overall Hindu calendar with all Hindu festivals in it.
You can also choose if you want to be observing a specific regional tradition. It's got Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Oriya. It does Jains as well as Hindus. It's got ISKCON. As for me, even if you scroll down, it's got Nepali. So whichever one you want, Those aren't all of the options, but there are a lot of the options. If you fall outside of that, you may have to look elsewhere for very community-specific resources, but if you are interested in any of those,
or the just broadly all-inclusive Hindu calendar or Jain calendar. It's got all of that covered. So it's by far the most thorough one-stop shop resource that there is so far. Okay, so if I scroll down here on that website slash calendars, I go down and I got yearly calendars. I got Hindu calendar and Indian calendar, which one of those should I be picking.
If you're not in India, then you should be picking Hindu calendar. India calendar will be official dates that are national holidays in the Republic of India. Got it. Okay, so let's go to the Hindu calendar then. I'm going to have a little follow along session here. Do you have a specific holiday I should be looking at? Where are we? We are in April. It's April 18th. We've got... Let's go back. We got solar new year and we got a whole bunch of things on April 13th.
Want to do one of those, or what would you like? Well, I think just for the interest of being evergreen, let's do the single most popular festival there is, which... Which is going to be, more people will use this one than any other. That's going to be Diwali Lakshmi Puta. Okay, scroll down. The one popular Hindu festival there is. October 20th, 2025, according to the Gregorian calendar. And I'm clicking on it. Yes. Okay. There we go.
I should say, while Diwali Lakshmi Puja is the most popular Hindu festival, it is not for all Hindus. There are some Hindus who don't do it at all. But for more Hindus than any other, this is the most popular average festival. Just one second here, I realized I must have opened this up last time I was in Los Angeles.
It's got me timings for Los Angeles. I'm now on the East Coast. Do I have to change that? Does it matter that much? It will change it, yes. So the other great thing about the Kwon Chung is that it will calculate it for any city. Now, they say any city in the world. I have found that some cities with population in the 10,000 or under range they don't have, but go with your nearest city that you can find if you're even within.
like 100 miles, you should be basically fine. Okay, let me change this to my nearest. yeah and then so what this gives you is in the big um reddish It says when you should do Lakshmi Puja at home. It'll default to give you 24-hour military time. If you prefer 12-hour AM, PM, you can switch into that mode. There's a little button for that. So where I'm located, I live in Bolingbroke, Illinois. It is telling me that to do Lakshmi Puja.
7.11 p.m. until 8.41 p.m. Yeah, I got 7.17 to 8.45. Yeah, because you're not quite in the same place as me. And so that is the best window to do Lakshmi Puja. If you're just a casual user, that's really all you need. That's when you should do Lakshmi Pooja in your home. If you care about getting into the weeds of how did they calculate that, then scroll down and look at all the tiny numbers and they explain exactly how and why.
They calculated that window because Lakshmi Puja and Diwali is supposed to take place. on Amavasya, which means the Titi of the new moon, and they say down to the minute when that Titi begins and when it ends. Within that, it's supposed to take place during Pradoskaal, a certain hour. hour not in the modern 24 hours in a day western sense but a unit of time in sanskrit which is um it's a little bit longer than a western hour And then... When does Pradoškal overlap with...
There are certain periods of time which are considered good for moving and certain periods of time which are traditionally considered stable and when something will stick in a place and for something like so for um if you were wanting blessings on sitting out on a journey you'd want to go into one of the moving ones and not one where you'll get stuck And if you asked for a jyotashi to set a muhur for you, they would take that into account. But for welcoming Lakshmi into your home,
and stabilizing the prosperity and the blessings of Maat al-Achmi in your home, you want one of the non-moving time periods. And Vrshabhaqal is a stable one. So the overlap... between Pradovskal and Vrshabagal during Amavasya Titi. The Venn diagram of when those three things are all prevailing, that is how they are deriving the window of one hour and 29 minutes, which is the best time to do Lakshmi Puja for most people.
If you get probably into the weeds, there are some tantric traditions, and this is talking about Lakshmi Puja at home. There are certain priesthood traditions in temples, certain traditions from tantric adepts. who will prefer to do lakshmi puja at a different time like later into the night uh they have their own very technical reasons for this Trapanchang does get into those if you want to be doing it according to Choghatiya Puja Mohrut or Nishitakaal Mohrut.
It gives you those too. It says for the average Hindu who just lives in your house and isn't a tantric specialist or a priest, don't do those. Do the one that it gave you in the big red font up top. That's what most people... To be fair, they're all big red fonts, but it's the first one you get to. You're right. They do give them all in big red fonts. That is her. But the one up top is for most people. But if you are following one of those other traditions, it gives you all of them.
So the vast majority of the fine printing here is not relevant to most Hindus. Just stick with the top line. It leads with what you need to know. But if you are doing one of those things, it gives you all of that information too. And if one scrolls down, we get all the dates for recent years, currently 2022 to 2032, and none of them overlap. It's not even the same Gregorian date. It didn't land on the same Gregorian date twice. 10 years. It usually won't because the number of different days
that it could fall on is considerably bigger than 10. So the odds of it hitting one twice within 10 years, I mean, it totally could happen, but it's not likely. Okay, so is there anything else Here's a question, totally skeptical. what if you do Lakshmi Puja outside those times? What if your kid that day has some sporting event that you just were like, I know it's Diwali, I know it's Lakshmi Puja, but this is an important basketball game, soccer game.
We can't do it then. Yeah. What's gone? That's fine. You can do Lakshmi Poja anytime. At which, this is just the optimum. It's optimal. It's optimal. The blessings, according to tradition, if you do it during this time, A little bit of extra spiritual energy will be available. And that's the pradosgal in Amavasya. That's why this puja is done on this particular night, according to tradition.
And the vrshabakal part of the calculation means that the energy which you invite into your home will tend to stick there better. and linger more strongly and for longer during this time, according to the tradition. If you do it during some other time, you're still getting benefit, maybe a tad less. Got it. Okay. So that was a pretty good overview of things I know we wanted to go into. But one thing that was occurring to me that I know that we've talked about in the past.
People like to forget about the fact that one island in Indonesia is predominantly Hindu and have a different Dharma tradition than Indian Hindu Dharma tradition. And what's your knowledge of how do those hinders in Bali actually go about this? Yeah. I don't know how many listeners we have in Bali. I could look it up. But for those that want to know, how are they doing it there? They've got two calendars that they use in Bali. The Balinese Hindus.
So one of them is the Dalivaha Hanasaka calendar, which I mentioned is used across the Dukan region in South India. And it also is widely used across Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Bali being in Indonesia also uses it. They have their own... They customized it. They have their own Balinese chocolate calendar. And not uniquely them, but the Cambodians have their own, the Thais have their own. Everybody...
customized it a little bit to their local rhythms of nature when the harvest season happens there and so on. So it's not going to be exactly the same, but they have the Shaka calendar, which is very similar to the Shalibahana Shaka calendar used. in those states in South India. They also have the indigenous Balinese calendar, which they were using before they got anything from India. That one's called the Powokan calendar. They still use both.
That one is an interesting one. They have a year of 210 days, which is obviously way, way off from a solar year. So sometimes one of the polecon festivals will occur twice. If it happened within the same Gregorian year, like if it happens in January in 2025, it's going to happen again later in 2025, 210 days later.
Some of their festivals in Bali, they do according to the Shaka calendar, and some of them according to the Powogon calendar. So there's two totally separate calendars that are simultaneously in use there. I'm just hanging on to 110 days and you have two festivals in one year. And then my mind went to the fact that I think
I'm not Jewish, but somebody can correct me that the way Hanukkah is set, sometimes there can be a year without Hanukkah because of the way that the cycle's about. That was everything that I had. I think I've got a pretty good, I've got a better grasp than what those years do too. But there's one thing I wanted to throw out to you just as a final thought. Sure. Some Hindu festivals, as you alluded to, are...
Definitely tied to the seasons, marking harvests and things like that. They're traditionally associated with spring, according to what spring is in the vast majority of India, or at least the central region, really.
It's occurred to me over the years, what do you think about the idea that in the West, if we're going to have a Western Hinduism, their Hindus are one point something for some of the US population. At some of these festivals, might shift our harvest time is different than elsewhere have you ever given any thought to that and if you haven't i will cut this question and if not yeah no i i have given some thought
What tends to shift more is the, and this is actually done in India too, this is not some new innovation to the Hindu dharmas, this has been going on in India, that the... Which aspects of a festival get emphasized might shift? For example, Holi is an example. In most of North India, Holi is done when it's getting warm out and spring is springing and to go outside and play colors and get soaked with water.
Feels good and fun. Almost in North America, yeah. And much of North, I actually lucked out this year. It was a super nice day on the actual day of Holy Foro for me. Often, it's really cold here. And so, Hindus have been doing this. They actually have been doing this. They've been doing two things. One is, on the actual day of Holi, they will do the parts that make sense. They will do the Holi Kadahana.
Fire ceremony. You don't have to get wet for that. They'll do that on the actual calendar day of holy. They'll do certain observances, but they might downplay the... Rangabali festival, part of the play in color, splashing each other and so on. And very frequently, Hindus in America will do that a full month later.
When it actually makes sense, given the rhythms of spring, where they are. So this isn't hypothetical. Hindus in America absolutely are doing this at many temples and communities all over the place. The original date still gets observed, but in the ways that make sense and not in the ways that are discordant with the local weather and seasons. And if there's something you wanted to do, like play colors,
Hindus in America all the time are doing that on an entirely different day when it makes sense to do that. And this is not some new, we're losing the original traditions in the West thing. This is how it's worked in India forever. 好 what might be a harvest festival for Telugu people, that the same date will get celebrated in a different region of India.
by the same name, but not so much as a harvest festival, but as a puja to a certain form of the supreme being or something. It'll be modified to what makes sense given the local traditions and regions. So this absolutely is how it is supposed to work and how it has traditionally worked. And a lot of Hindu groups, at least in the U.S., are making some of those adjustments. And I think it's absolutely valid. Right. I wasn't totally off the market.
This is a part of the show where I normally ask you to plug anything you're working on, where people can follow you, but I think we know that everyone can go to the HAF website, www.induamerican.org. Dave, is there anything just from RHAF work you're excited about right now to leave people with? Totally doesn't have to do with calendars. Oh, yeah. So much stuff that I'm excited about. I mean, a lot of it is coming to K through 12 classrooms around the country, which is...
perhaps relevant to Sambo centers and not others, depending on whether you have kids currently in American school or currently might be a little late. If they're young, then hopefully we'll have time to impact their education going forward in lots of states that's going on. But I am excited to be rolling out community resources, some of those coming soon with new primers on foundational concepts of Hindu dharmas with our new educational approach here.
So, yeah, keep your eyes peeled on HAF's website, on social media. The Ed Department has lots of stuff cooking that is going to be coming down the pipeline. And community-facing stuff, probably... Um, but Follow and subscribe. When you're listening to it, I'll be sure that more of these get made by making a donation to