Calendric conversions

If you know the date of a birth, marriage or death as per the Gregorian calendar but do not know the roz, mah or even day of the week, there is help at hand. Reader Noshir M. Khambatta writes to inform Parsiana that a young, talented and enterprising Zarathushti, Arzan Aspi Lali, has provided a signal service for fellow religionists by creating a website that instantly converts any date from the Gregorian calendar into the Shahenshahi, Kadmi or Fasli calendars. The process can be used in reverse as well to convert any known roz and mah into dates in the Gregorian calendar. Lali, a computer software developer by profession, is the creator and designer of http://ahura.thelalis.com which can be accessed through a domain.

Researching many algorithms and computer programs to facilitate accurate conversion between two sets of dates, Lali has employed these in his master algorithm that finally carries out the computations. Calendars are also displayed by month along with phases of the moon and a separate table of the chaughariyas (timings). Conscious that some members of the community can only read and write in Gujarati, Lali spent an enormous amount of time to display all his work in the Gujarati language and script as well, using UNICODE fonts so that users do not have to download special fonts to view the page, Khambatta informs.

The calendrical conversion process employs a recursion algorithm that uses a fixed date in the year 2000 AD and calculates the result for the next or the previous year, while feeding this computed result back to the same algorithm to calculate the next or the previous year. It continues this process and stops when it has reached the requisite date to be converted. On an average it will take around one second to display results if they are around ±50 years from 2000 AD and about four seconds if they are in the 1800 AD to 2100 AD range. Currently Lali is working on a completely different algorithm, more epoch based than recursive, that will take mere milliseconds to compute any result and will expand the range of the computational calendar for 900 years from 1600 AD to 2400 AD. A time factor has been incorporated into the algorithm with an error tolerance of one second.

The website is exceptionally user friendly, as Parsiana discovered while accessing it through Google. Khambatta testifies that he has personally checked the conversions of over 1,000 birth and death dates of prominent Parsi personalities from the volumes of Parsee Prakash and found all of them to be accurate. The conversions are best if done within the past 200 years, and Lali is doing his best to extend it further back in time as well as into the future. No longer has one to worry if one is confronted with an odd date in an unusual format. All one needs to do is to select the appropriate module, choose the available data and click the mouse to get an accurate conversion.