How Kanha's text is made

The short version

• The verse on the front of every card is quoted from Swami Swarupananda's English translation, first published in 1909. It is in the public domain, and a person wrote it, not an AI.
• The plain-English explanation on the back is Kanha's own wording. I drafted it with AI help and reviewed it myself.
• The mascot and the painted chapter art are AI-generated. The app's code was partly written with AI help.
• No scholar has reviewed the explanations yet. If you are one and would like to, please write to me.

The verse on the front

The front of each card quotes Swami Swarupananda's translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which dates from 1909. The verse is quoted, not paraphrased. You can read the same translation free online at sacred-texts.com and check any card against it.

Kanha has 605 cards covering 644 verses of chapters 2 to 18. Twenty-seven of the cards carry two to four neighbouring verses together. Chapter 1 is told as a short illustrated story instead of verse by verse.

Typing a book into an app can introduce slips. That is why every chapter was checked a second time, described below.

The explanation on the back

Turn a card over and you see a short line in plain English, then a longer explanation. These are Kanha's words, written from the ideas in the Gita and in published commentary. I drafted them with AI help, and I reviewed them.

They are an aid for reading the verse, not a replacement for it, and not a commentary from a teacher of any tradition. If you want a tradition's reading of the Gita, read a commentary from that tradition. The guide on how to read the Bhagavad Gita says how to choose one.

One writing rule applies to every card: it has to make sense read on its own. Kanha lets you jump to any chapter and share a single card, so any card can be the only one a person sees. Each card names what it is talking about instead of leaning on an earlier card.

How it was checked

The first version of Kanha I showed people had only my own plain-English summaries and no real translation, and readers rightly pushed back. Someone put my card for verse 2.18 next to the actual text: my summary said to go and do what is yours to do, and the verse says to fight. So I switched the front of every card to Swarupananda's translation.

After the switch, every chapter got a second full read against the source text. A separate AI session did that read, one with no memory of the first pass. It was not a human. It found real mistakes: some verses I had not switched over, one verse where the meaning had changed, and loose wording in several others. All of them were fixed.

That check is useful, but it is not a scholar's review, and I would not claim it is.

What AI did and did not do

Some readers consider AI art unsuitable for this subject, and I will not argue with that. I used it because I cannot draw.

What Kanha does not claim

• It does not show the Sanskrit text. The cards carry the English translation only.
• It is not a commentary, and it is not religious instruction. It is a way to read the verses a few at a time and understand them in plain English.
• It is an Android app for now, and you sign in once so your progress follows you across phones.

Found a mistake?

Write to kanhaa9977@gmail.com, or use Send feedback in the app's Profile tab. Please say the chapter and verse. Corrections go out in the next app update.

You can read why I built the app on the Our Story page.