Aaj ka choghadiya, for your sunrise — not somebody else's
Every choghadiya table is only true for one place. Ask Ru divides your day, between your sunrise and sunset, and names the periods that follow from it: choghadiya, Rahu Kaal, Gulika, Yamaganda and Abhijit.
Why the place matters more than the table
Choghadiya is not a clock time. The day from sunrise to sunset is cut into eight equal parts and the night from sunset to the next sunrise into eight more, so every boundary moves with your latitude and the season. A table computed for Delhi is wrong in Chennai by the better part of an hour, and wrong in Delhi six months later.
That is the whole reason Ask Ru asks where you are. It uses an approximate location only — city accuracy is all a sunrise needs — and if you would rather not share it, it falls back to the birth city already saved in your profile and tells you which place it used. Nothing is computed from a place you were not shown.
The eight of the day, and the eight of the night
Seven names repeat around a ring, and the day begins at a different point for each weekday — Sunday opens with Udveg, Monday with Amrit, Tuesday with Rog, and so on by the lord of the day.
The night is its own ring, not the day's continued. This is where most tables — and our own first attempt — go wrong: the night order is Shubh, Amrit, Char, Rog, Kaal, Labh, Udveg, and the weekday it opens on does not fall out of the day's by any fixed offset.
| Choghadiya | Taken as | Commonly used for |
|---|---|---|
| Amrit | Auspicious | Anything you want to last |
| Shubh | Auspicious | Ceremonies, auspicious starts |
| Labh | Auspicious | Work, money, new undertakings |
| Char | Auspicious | Travel and movement |
| Udveg | Avoided | — |
| Kaal | Avoided | — |
| Rog | Avoided | — |
Where the sources disagree, we say so. Published panchangs do not fully agree on which choghadiya the night opens with on Tuesday and Saturday. The app follows the majority reading and marks those two as contested rather than printing them as settled. If your family follows a particular panchang, trust it over us on those two rows.
Rahu Kaal, Gulika and Yamaganda
These three are not choghadiya. Each is one eighth of the daytime, and which eighth depends only on the weekday — Rahu Kaal falls in the eighth part on Sunday, the second on Monday, the seventh on Tuesday, and so on. Because they are eighths of your day, they move with your sunrise exactly as the choghadiya do.
- Rahu Kaal — the period most widely avoided for beginning something.
- Yamaganda and Gulika — the two usually named beside it.
Abhijit — and the day it does not come
Abhijit is the eighth of the fifteen muhurats between sunrise and sunset, roughly the middle of the day, and it is widely taken as auspicious even when the choghadiya around it is not. It is not given on Wednesday. Ask Ru omits it that day rather than printing a period it does not stand behind.
The day itself: tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana
Alongside the periods, Ask Ru shows the day's panchang — the tithi and its paksha, the nakshatra the Moon is in, the yoga and the karana — computed from the same sidereal positions as everything else in the app, rather than copied from a feed.
Questions people ask
What is Rahu Kaal, in one line?
One eighth of the daytime, different for each weekday, widely avoided for starting something new. Because it is an eighth of the day between your sunrise and your sunset, it moves with your place and the season.
Why does your choghadiya differ from the one in my panchang?
Almost always because of place: the periods are cut from local sunrise and sunset, so a table made for another city will not match. Two rows — the night choghadiya on Tuesday and Saturday — are also genuinely contested between published panchangs, and we mark those rather than hide them.
Does Ask Ru need my location?
It asks for an approximate location only, because city accuracy is all a sunrise calculation needs. If you decline, it uses the birth city saved in your profile and tells you which place the answer was computed for.
Is this a prediction?
No. These are divisions of the day from classical method, not a forecast of what will happen in them. Ru is an AI and says so on every reading she gives.
Ask Ru is in final testing. Android first, iOS next, in English and Hinglish. Join the waiting list on the main page and you will know when she opens.