Most of us grew up with more than one calendar in our lives, even if we didn’t think of it that way. The school calendar and the office calendar. The panchang on the kitchen wall, or the prayer timetable from the mosque, the jantri from the derasar, the Roj–Mah calendar from the agiary, the Nanakshahi jantri from the gurdwara. And, often enough, a neighbour’s calendar too: the day we were invited for sheer khurma, the evening we joined the garba, the morning we were handed sweets for Navroz or Gurpurab.
India has always lived in many calendars at once. That’s not a complication to be solved. It’s one of the most beautiful things about the country.
The idea
The apps we found were, almost always, built for one community. That’s understandable: each tradition’s calendar takes care to get right. But it meant that a family, a housing society or a workplace that spans communities had to juggle several apps, or none.
So we asked a simple question: what if one app held every community’s calendar, with the same care for each? Not a generic calendar with festivals sprinkled in, but a proper Home screen for each community, built the way that community keeps time, with the methods and sects it actually follows.
That’s OIOA. You choose your community in Settings, and the app adapts: a panchang with muhurat windows, prayer times and the Qibla, Jain tithis with Navkarshi, Parsi Roj and Mah, the Nanakshahi calendar. Underneath, the tools everyone shares: holidays, reminders, family, groups and the rest.
Equal, on purpose
We made some deliberate choices:
- No community is primary. Every community has its own Home screen, with the same depth. On our website they’re listed alphabetically, and the order says so.
- Methods are your choice. Where a community follows different reckonings, we offer them rather than picking one: Jain sect calendars, Islamic calculation methods and calendar options, three Parsi calendars, two versions of the Nanakshahi calendar.
- No ranking, no filtering. OIOA doesn’t discriminate on religion, caste, creed, community, gender, language, region or colour.
- Language is not a barrier. English and 13 more languages, with more welcome.
- It works offline, because timings are needed most where networks are weakest.
What we know we’ll need help with
We’ll make mistakes. Traditions vary from family to family and region to region, and no team, however careful, knows them all. A date will be off for someone’s sangh; a word will be wrong in someone’s language; a community will be missing entirely.
So we’ve tried to make it easy to tell us, and to make our response visible. Every request is read by a person. We check sources. We reply. And we show the outcome on a public roadmap.
A humble attempt
We call OIOA a humble attempt, and we mean it. It won’t change the world. But we hope it’s a small, daily reminder that the people next door keep time a little differently, and that their days matter too.
If your community isn’t in OIOA yet, please ask us to add it. If we’ve got something wrong, please tell us what we missed.