Skip to main content

Carry the calendar in your mind

 The mobile phone has a calendar making planning easier than ever. But for those who love to play with numbers, the calendar can be a fun game. You can keep the entire year’s calendar in your mind if you can remember 12 numbers, one for each month. Be prepared to do a little arithmetic too. It’s fun if you love numbers.

400

351

362

402

Can you memorise those numbers? Easy, right? Now what do you do with them?

The first number is for January, the second for Feb, and so son.

Let’s see which day of the week is the next Republic Day. The Republic Day is on Jan 26. Add the number for Jan to the date.

26 + 4 = 30

Now divide that sum (30) by 7. The quotient (the answer you get when you do the division) is immaterial for us. We only need the reminder. In this example, the reminder is 2.

30 ÷ 7 = 4 & reminder 2

So Jan 26 is Tuesday.

If the reminder is 0, it’s Sunday.

Reminder 1 = Mon

Reminder 2 = Tue

Reminder 3 = Wed

Reminder 4 = Thu

Reminder 5 = Fri

Reminder 6 = Sat

Another Example

Which day is Independence Day?

The number for August is 6. Add that to the date.

15 + 6 = 21

21 ÷ 7 = 3, no reminder. Hence, Sunday.

Work out as many examples as you like.

 


Now how does a month get its number. Simple. Just subtract the date of the first Sunday from 7.

Example: The first Sun of Jan 2021 is 3rd.

7 – 3 = 4, which is the number for Jan.

You can make mental calendar for any year using this.

 

Let me add a personal touch to this. I have been using the mental calendar right from my boyhood. I first learnt about it from a children’s magazine when I was in high school. Ever since I have relied on the mental calendar. It takes just a few seconds to find out the day of any date once you are used to this.

 

 

Comments

  1. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuDecember 6, 2020 at 10:02 AM

    Thanks for sharing this. This is really interesting and thanks for introducing this concept with !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 6, 2020 at 10:08 AM

      My pleasure. I wrote this with some nostalgia about those boyhood days when I showed off much with this 'magic'.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Grandeur of the dooms

John Keats by William Hilton [Wikipedia] One of the poems included in CBSE’s class 12 English literature is an extract from Keats’ Endymion . A question that has come to me again and again from students as well as teachers is: What does “the grandeur of the dooms…” mean? It is a line that has perplexed me too. I have been amused by the kind of interpretations given in the guidebooks for students. Quite many of these books interpret the word ‘dooms’ to mean the Doomsday. Look at the following answer given in one such guidebook made available online by a well-known educational establishment.  That is very amusing considering the fact that Keats was an agnostic, if not a confirmed atheist. Keats would never accept a God who would come riding a majestic cloud on the day of the Last Judgment to apportion the good and the evil souls to Heaven and Hell. Evil is an integral part of life, Keats knew too well. No human can avoid evil any more than “a rose can avoid a blighting wind.” How...
7 comments
Read more

Broligarchy

A page from Time Broligarchy is a new word I learnt from the latest issue of the Time magazine one of whose lead stories is titled ‘ American Broligarchy ’. Wikipedia teaches me that ‘broligarchy’ is “a neologism and portmanteau combining oligarchy and broism describing the rule of government by a coterie of extremely wealthy men (occupying leadership roles in the tech companies and tech-enabled businesses).” The Time article informs us that Trump’s greatest “bros” are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three men who were given the most prominent seats, ahead of Cabinet members, at Trump’s Presidential inauguration. These wealthy businessmen play crucial roles in Trump’s way of governing America. They pump a lot of unregulated money into politics for their own selfish reasons. A menacing outcome is an unhealthy (for the public) expansion of presidential power with fewer checks on the Congress. The Time laments that this “would be a recipe for more corruption under an...
10 comments
Read more

Love Affair of Pearl Spot

AI-generated I am not fond of fish. Fish doesn’t taste like fish, that’s the reason. We get adulterated fish most of the time. In Kerala, my state, traders are reported to use formalin for preserving the freshness of fish. Formalin is used for preserving dead bodies by embalming. You will find me in a fish stall once in a while, though. My cats want fish occasionally, that’s why. Not that they are particularly fond of it. For a change from the regular pellets and packaged wet foods, all delivered promptly by Amazon. Even cats love a change. Most of the time, the entire fish that I buy is consumed by my cats. So much so, Maggie and I have come to think that fish is cat food, not human food. People may have different reasons for not eating any particular food. One of the most endearing reasons I heard recently is that fish is a symbol of the voiceless. People commit atrocities on fish, this person said [I forget who – I read it a couple of weeks back on Magzter]. They suffocate it ...
11 comments
Read more

A Crazy Novel

Jayasree Kalathil, Sandhya Mary, and the book Book Review Title: Maria, Just Maria Author: Sandhya Mary Translator: Jayasree Kalathil T his is a crazy novel. It is hard to find a normal human being in it. There is more than one place in the narrative where we are told that every human being is insane to some degree. I won’t disagree with that. However, there are certain standards or wavelengths which are generally considered to be ‘normal’ if not sane and it is that normalcy which keeps the world going. Sandhya Mary’s debut novel flings a huge question mark on that normalcy. As I was reading this novel, I was constantly reminded of a joke that Albert Camus narrates in his brilliant essay on the meaning of life, The Myth of Sisyphus . A madman is sitting by a swimming pool with a fishing rod in hand. Seeing his serenity, his psychiatrist [I think in Camus’s own version it’s just a passerby – but I find the psychiatrist more appropriate] asks him whether he has caught any fish....
6 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more