New calendar for the new millennium!
By Mohinder Singh

HOW about a new calendar for the new millennium? Something simple and sensible! And what could be a more befitting occasion for it than the start of the third millennium . More so when a huge effort is being mounted to refigure computers to the millennium change.

The current Gregorian calendar is a monument to historical prejudices. And it is an astronomically meaningless hodge-podge of pagan superstitions and misconceptions. The calendar is hard to learn when you are a child and awkward to use the rest of your life. Often you have to consult a calendar to link a date with the day of the week.

Willy-nilly the whole world has been persuaded to go along with the Gregorian calendar because of the western hegemony. Surely various other calendars continue to operate over the globe, such as the Indian, Chinese, Islamic and Jewish. Yet it’s the Gregorian one that primarily regulates our life, more so of business, work, and travel.

Umpteen proposals have been put forth from time to time to reform this calendar. The one advocated by many pragmatic people would have a calendar year of 13 months, each 28 days long, for a total of 364 days. And one "fill-in" day to make the 365 required for a solar year, coupled with an additional day every four years.

Every month, consisting of exactly four weeks, could start on Sunday. This will establish fixed dates for each day of the week. For example, every Monday would invariably fall on the second, ninth, sixteenth, and twentythird of every month.

Allied is the proposal to start new year from December 22, the date from which days begin to lengthen in the Northern Hemisphere. And December 22, termed New Year’s Day, would be the extra 365th. It will belong to no month and will have no day-of-the-week designation. A new year will actually start from December 23, the first Sunday of the first month.

And while days of the week can keep their existing nomenclature for convenience sake, there is a good case for renaming the existing 12 months, plus coining a name for the thirteenth month. Possibly the exercise could best be undertaken by the United Nations. The new month/names may well give representation to major world cultures and civilisations. Currently, some months are named after Roman Emperors, while others are factually incorrect. Originally, September, October, November and December were the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months as their names denote. Now they are ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth in our calendar.

Of course, any such proposal will provoke objections. Firstly, people loathe to change something to which they have grown acclimatised. We experienced resistance to the change over from English system of measurements to the metric one, though the latter is vastly superior in its simplicity and ease of use. Now metric system is gaining universal acceptance.

Employers will object to a 13-month year; they’ll have to pay 13 monthly salaries instead of 12. Some will object for sentimental reasons to any change in birthdays; they’re so accustomed to celebrate on particular dates. Even the dates of national days will undergo change; it won’t be January 26 for the Republic Day.

The point is that radical calendar changes have been made in the past. A year after, nobody cares; a generation later, nobody remembers.

Take one instance. After 1,627 years of Julian astronomy the earth was 10 days ahead of the calendar. Pope Gregory XIII summarily solved the problem by decreeing that October 5,1582, would become October 15,1582. At another time, people went to bed on September 2,1752, and woke up on September 14, 1752.

It all hinges on the question whether the motivation to have a simpler, more rational calendar is strong enough to overcome the immense inertia involved in a radical calendar change. The answer may well be a disappointing no. That way the world would soldier on with an overly complicated calendar into the Third Millennium.

The next millennium could be tough;we can use all the help we can get, such as an easier calendar.