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January - 2003 - issue > Entrepreneurship
Webpanditji Post-retirement startup
Pradeep Shankar & Venkat Ramana
Wednesday, January 1, 2003
THE FICKLE HINDU CALENDAR FOLLOWS sidereal time (based on the positions of stars) and changes festival dates every year. Panchaang is a software that attempts to help in these complex time calculations. Interestingly, the software was written by a self-made programmer who learned programming in his retirement and has come a long way in developing these complicated astrology programs.

Nagarathna Gopalan never thought about commercializing the astrology-based programs that he had written out of interest, while in employment. His retired life took a turn when he visited his son in the U.S. in 1994. At his son’s suggestion, Gopalan combined the various programs he had written and released it as a software package—Panchaang, which worked on DOS. Marketing Panchaang was a big challenge. To create awareness, Gopalan took out ads in the local newspapers and magazines. And very soon, he managed to sell quite a few copies of Panchaang.

Excited by the sales figures, Gopalan decided to design a similar product on the Windows platform in 1999. He spent about six months coding his new product—Panditji2000. With added features, Panditji2000 could do more than what Panchaang could do. More features meant increased programming complexity, but Gopalan was able to handle it. Gopalan agrees that there was already software related to astrology in the Indian market even when the Panditji2000 was launched. “However, Panditji2000 provides exact information that no other software could provide,” claims Gopalan.

“Immigrant Indians, Vedic astrology enthusiasts, and Hindus worldwide have a keen desire to observe festivals, celebrate occasions like birthdays (ayush homum), house warming (grihapravesha), and weddings, cast a horoscope chart when a child is born, and use matching techniques to determine marriage compatibility. One does not have easy access to these kinds of information everywhere in the world. Panditji2000 is an accurate, economical program that provides horoscope related information, helpful for practising Hindus and astrology enthusiasts, at any place in the world,” says Gopalan.

“Astrology has two parts,” explains Gopalan, “The first part is the compilation of horoscope, which is entirely mathematical. This is a perfect science. The second part is the interpretation of planetary positions in relation to a man's life. This is more of a statistical science. I did not design Panditji2000 to handle the interpretation part because it cannot be mathematically computed. Panditji2000 provides the data required for interpretation that an astrologer can use within seconds. Because the computations involved are so heavy, even a professional astrologer will take days to do it manually. And the chances of error are greater.”

So far, the product has been well received worldwide. It has been shipped to the remote corners of the world like Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Ecuador, England, Germany, India, Italy, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, Trinidad, USA, and many more countries. Gopalan has now launched the second version. “I have incorporated significant enhancements in Panditji 2002, which makes it a must-have utility tool in the cyber age for anyone connected with Hinduism and Vedic astrology,” says Gopalan. Making the software available online is his next priority.

Gopalan has developed these programs in C language, and used Visual Basic to design the front-end. He knew neither C nor Visual Basic when he had retired, and learned them on his own. Gopalan began his career in 1950 as a lecturer of mathematics at Annamalai University. After five years, Gopalan joined the Survey of India where he was involved in preparing maps of Indian topography and conducting large-scale engineering surveys.

Gopalan saw a computer as early as 1964, when he was sent on a training course at the U.K. from the Survey of India. “The PCs today bear no comparison to what I saw in 1964,” smiles Gopalan. “We used punched cards to key in data into the computer.” On his return, Gopalan was posted to Dehradun, the headquarters of Survey of India. “My work was related to photogrammetry, a branch of surveying, where using aerial photographs, we calculate the land profile.” In his SAI tenure, Gopalan worked in Nigeria, London and Jamaica. His work engendered a keen interest in astrology, sidereal time, and slowly, Hindu astrology.

At 73, Gopalan is as excited as a 22-year old college graduate about technology and what he can do with it.

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