I am very proud of Muhuratam, my first android app to hit Google play store. I have developed a habit of asking android phone owners (who would know what choghadiya/choghariya is) to install my app and give reviews. The purpose of this blog post is to answer one of the FAQ I have been confronted with , by people who have been impressed with the app.
The question always makes me ponder over the exact time when this idea incepted ( or the ‘muhurat’ so to speak 😛 )
Before starting any good work (buying new things, starting a journey, performing a prayer/pooja, etc.), it’s a tradition for us to check whether the time when we are going to start that task is good or not, based on the choghadiya at that particular instance in time. That day, I was sitting with my elder brother, Ravi Soni, and few other cousins, when it was required to check choghadiya (someone had to buy a new vehicle), but everyone was too lazy to go and fetch the calendar (where the day and night choghadiya table is printed) and one of the cousins took out his new android phone (apparently Dell stopped making that model now) to show a photo of the choghadiya table, specially taken for emergencies as this one (pretty smart I must say).
So this is how it basically works, Even though there is a chart on the calendar, you actually have to calculate the time assuming 6 AM as sunrise time and then increase it by 1.5hrs for each choghadiya. I thought (and told everyone) that there should be a mobile app which does this calculation for you (start from 6 AM, then keep on adding 1.5hrs and find the choghadiya based on day), to which Ravi bhaiya (elder brother is referred to as “bhaiya” in Hindi) asked “Why don’t you make an app for this?” (Those days I was speaking a lot about android development and how I wish to learn it), taken aback by thought of how can I make such an app (questioning my abilities rather than thinking of the development roadmap :P) I thought for a while and said “Why not!”.
Although, I was reading a lot about how people are making their own mobile applications and wanted to learn it myself how to but I “NEVER HAD TIME” (later realized, you always have time for what you really want to do) and this is something I was waiting for, a motivation to take out some time from my “BUSY” schedule and learn something new (warning: it becomes a habit to learn and do new/innovative stuff, once you start to enjoy it). Since then I have learned a lot about software design, vedic astrology, startups, web development, marketing, mobility, business development, entrepreneurship, hacking (not cracking), problem solving and obviously making android apps. This all is a direct/indirect result of Muhuratam and am glad that I made it.
Today, Muhuratam has been downloaded around 10,000 times in more than 90 different countries. I have earned back more than double of whatever money I had put in for publishing it in Google Play and it is also fetching me more users for my new app “Internet Usage”. It also helped me get a release from a maintenance project and move to a development project, when one of the managers saw my mail asking for reviews.
Hope this story motivates someone else also to learn something new or to make them dig out some time in their “busy schedules” to do something they really want to, and if you are wondering, where to start, you can try these two simple steps I have started following recently:-
- Look around you, find something that is difficult/irritates you/makes you angry
- Solve it!
Happy learning!!
PS:- Choghadiya is also known as dukhdiya in some cities and a few people also pronounce it as Choghariya. You can download the app from here – https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cc.mobile.demo.muhuratam
